The Great Shark Hunt Part 35

I stared at him for a moment, then went over to the couch and sat down. "Jesus Christ!" I said. "Let's go back and run the whole story again. I must have missed something."

You are better lost than found.

-- CLEMENT R ROBINSON.

Which was true. The story I got from Benton was from Mike Solheim, who got it in spades from a total stranger who said his name was Drake and who showed up in Aspen one afternoon, looking for me because he thought I could put him in touch with Oscar Acosta -- a "dead man" who somehow showed up at Drake's home in Coconut Grove one night last summer and offered $5,000 in cash for a midnight ride out to Bimini and back in Drake's new $48,000 ocean racer with no questions asked.

It was not the kind of business proposition that a veteran dope smuggler like Drake would have been likely to misunderstand. There are only two possible reasons for even owning owning a thirty-five-foot-long bullet-shaped fibergla.s.s hull with a thirty-five-foot-long bullet-shaped fibergla.s.s hull with two two 370 horsepower engines on the back: One is to win races in the open sea at speeds up to 90.555 miles an hour (the current world record, set by the "World Champion Cigarette Racing Team" in 1976) and the other has to do with the virtually priceless peace of mind that comes with doing business in a boat that will outrun anything the U.S. Coast Guard can put in the water. 370 horsepower engines on the back: One is to win races in the open sea at speeds up to 90.555 miles an hour (the current world record, set by the "World Champion Cigarette Racing Team" in 1976) and the other has to do with the virtually priceless peace of mind that comes with doing business in a boat that will outrun anything the U.S. Coast Guard can put in the water.

So there was no need for Drake to ask why why these two cash-heavy Mexicans needed his boat, or even why one of them came aboard with a Uzi submachine gun. He had made this run before, and even on moonless nights he felt he knew every b.u.mp in the water, even at sixty miles an hour. . . these two cash-heavy Mexicans needed his boat, or even why one of them came aboard with a Uzi submachine gun. He had made this run before, and even on moonless nights he felt he knew every b.u.mp in the water, even at sixty miles an hour. . .

But he was not ready for what happened on the way back from Bimini this this time: They were almost home, slowing down to half-speed or less about a mile off the south tip of Key Biscayne, when he was suddenly blinded by spotlights coming into his face from the front and both sides and the whole night erupted with gunfire. The Mexican with the Uzi was dead on his feet before Drake even heard the first shots; the Uzi bounced into the water and the Mexican sat down in the c.o.c.kpit with at least ten big holes in his chest. Drake felt his boat shuddering in the water as the hull started coming apart in the crossfire. "We're surrounded!" he screamed. "They're killing us!" Then he fell down and tried to hide himself under the dead man just as Oscar got his hands on both the wheel and the throttle at the same time. The big speedboat lunged forward with a roar and the next thing Drake felt was an airborne jolt as his boat ran straight over the top of a twenty-foot Boston Whaler. . . and suddenly there was no more shooting as he felt the boat moving toward Miami at sixty miles an hour with the c.o.c.kpit six inches deep in blood-colored water and Oscar screaming in Spanish as they started coming up, too fast, on the lights of Dinner Key. time: They were almost home, slowing down to half-speed or less about a mile off the south tip of Key Biscayne, when he was suddenly blinded by spotlights coming into his face from the front and both sides and the whole night erupted with gunfire. The Mexican with the Uzi was dead on his feet before Drake even heard the first shots; the Uzi bounced into the water and the Mexican sat down in the c.o.c.kpit with at least ten big holes in his chest. Drake felt his boat shuddering in the water as the hull started coming apart in the crossfire. "We're surrounded!" he screamed. "They're killing us!" Then he fell down and tried to hide himself under the dead man just as Oscar got his hands on both the wheel and the throttle at the same time. The big speedboat lunged forward with a roar and the next thing Drake felt was an airborne jolt as his boat ran straight over the top of a twenty-foot Boston Whaler. . . and suddenly there was no more shooting as he felt the boat moving toward Miami at sixty miles an hour with the c.o.c.kpit six inches deep in blood-colored water and Oscar screaming in Spanish as they started coming up, too fast, on the lights of Dinner Key.

Drake stood up and took the wheel. The boat felt like it was coming apart in his hands as he aimed for a clump of trees on the dark end of the marina. By the time he felt the jolt of a sandbar under his feet, Oscar was already going over the side with the small suitcase they had picked up in Bimini, and that was the last time Drake saw him.

The boat stayed miraculously afloat long enough for him to hump the dead man and dump his $48,000 wreck about a half-mile down the beach in a place where he could drive it up under some branches and watch it sink out of sight in five feet of dark water. Drake covered the hulk as well as he could, then slogged out to Biscayne Boulevard and hitchhiked back to Coconut Grove where he spent the next forty-eight hours locked in his bedroom and trembling with a fear worse than anything he'd ever felt in his life.

This wild and puzzling story out of Coconut Grove was only the latest of a dozen or so "Brown Buffalo sightings" in the past two years. Everybody who knew him as even a casual friend has heard stories about Oscar's "secret life" and his high-speed criminal adventures all over the world. Ever since his alleged death/disappearance in 1973, '74 or even 1975, he's turned up all over the world -- selling guns in Addis Ababa, buying orphans in Cambodia, smoking weed with Henry Kissinger in Acapulco, hanging around the airport bar in Lima with two or three overstuffed Pan Am flight bags on both shoulders or hunched impatiently on the steering wheel of a silver 450 Mercedes in the "Nothing to Declare" lane on the Mexican side of U.S. Customs checkpoint between San Diego and Tijuana.

There are not many gypsies on file at the Missing Persons Bureau -- and if Oscar was not quite the cla.s.sic gypsy, in his own eyes or mine, it was only because he was never able to cut that high-tension cord that kept him forever attached to his childhood home and hatchery. By the time he was twenty years old, Oscar was working overtime eight days a week at learning to live and even think like a gypsy, but he never quite jumped the gap.

Although I was born in El Paso, Texas, I am actually a small town kid. A hick from the sticks, a Mexican boy from the other side of the tracks. I grew up in Riverbank, California; Post Office Box 303; population 3969. It's the only town in the entire state whose essential numbers remained unchanged. The sign that welcomes you as you round the curve coming in from Modesto says THE CITY OF ACTION THE CITY OF ACTION.

We lived in a two-room shack without a floor. We had to pump our water and use kerosene if we wanted to read at night. But we never went hungry. My old man always bought the pinto beans and the white flour for the tortillas in one-hundred-pound sacks which my mother used to make dresses, sheets and curtains. We had two acres of land which we planted every year with corn, tomatoes and yellow chiles for the hot sauce. Even before my father woke us, my old ma was busy at work making the tortillas at five a.m. while he chopped the logs we'd hauled up from the river on the weekends.

Riverbank is divided into three parts, and in my corner of the world there were only three kinds of people: Mexicans, Okies and Americans. Catholics, Holy Rollers and Protestants. Peach pickers, cannery workers and clerks.

We lived on the West Side, within smelling distance of the world's largest tomato paste cannery.

The West Side is still enclosed by the Santa Fe Railroad tracks to the east, the Modesto-Oakdale Highway to the north and the irrigation ca.n.a.l to the south. Within that concentration only Mexicans were safe from the neighborhood dogs, who responded only to Spanish commands. Except for Bob Whitt and Emitt Brown, both friends of mine who could cuss in better Spanish than I, I never saw a white person walking the dirt road of our neighborhood.

-- Oscar Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, 1972 The Lawn of Fire and Another Icepick for Richard Nixon for Old Times' Sake. . . Slow Fadeout for Brown Power & a Salute to Crazy Ed. . . Poison Fat Goes to Mazatlan; Libel Lawyers Go to the Mattresses. . . Fear of the Plastic Fork & a Twisted Compromise. . .

Oscar Zeta Acosta -- despite any claims to the contrary -- was a dangerous thug who lived every day of his life as a stalking monument to the notion that a man with a greed for the Truth should expect no mercy and give none. . .

. . . and that was the difference between Oscar and a lot of the merciless geeks he liked to tell strangers he admired: cla.s.s acts like Benito Mussolini and Fatty Arbuckle.

When the great scorer comes to write against Oscar's name, one of the first few lines in the Ledger will note that he usually lacked the courage of his consistently monstrous convictions. There was more mercy, madness, dignity and generosity in that overweight, overworked and always overindulged brown cannonball of a body than most of us will meet in any human package even three times Oscar's size for the rest of our lives -- which are all running noticeably leaner on the high side, since that rotten fat spic disappeared.

He was a drug-addled brute and a genuinely fiendish adversary in court or on the street -- but it was none of these these things that finally pressured him into death or a disappearance so finely plotted that it amounts to the same thing. things that finally pressured him into death or a disappearance so finely plotted that it amounts to the same thing.

What finally cracked the Brown Buffalo was the bridge he refused to build between the self-serving elegance of his instincts and the self-destructive carnival of his reality. He was a Baptist missionary at a leper colony in Panama before he was a lawyer in Oakland and East L.A., or a radical-chic author in San Francisco and Beverly Hills. . . But whenever things got tense or when he had to work close to the bone, he was always a missionary. And that was the governing instinct that ruined him for anything else. He was a preacher in the courtroom, a preacher at the typewriter and a flat-out awesome preacher when he cranked his head full of acid.

That's LSD-25, folks -- a certified "dangerous drug" that is no longer fas.h.i.+onable, due to reasons of extreme and unnatural heaviness. The CIA was right about acid: Some of their best and brightest operatives went over the side in the name of Top Secret research on a drug that was finally abandoned as a far too dangerous and unmanageable thing to be used as a public weapon. Not even the sacred minnock of "national security" could justify the hazards of playing with a thing too small to be seen and too big to control. The professional spook mentality was far more comfortable with things like nerve gas and neutron bombs.

But not the Brown Buffalo -- he ate LSD-25 with a relish that bordered on wors.h.i.+p. When his brain felt bogged down in the mundane nuts and bolts horrors of the Law or some dead-end ma.n.u.script, he would simply take off in his hotrod Mustang for a week on the road and a few days of what he called "walking with the King." Oscar used acid like other lawyers use Valium -- a distinctly unprofessional and occasionally nasty habit that shocked even the most liberal of his colleagues and frequently panicked his clients.

I was with him one night in L.A., when he decided that the only way to meaningfully communicate with a Judge who'd been leaning on him in the courtroom was to drive out to the man's home in Santa Monica and set his whole front lawn on fire after soaking it down with ten gallons of gasoline. . . and then, instead of fleeing into the night like some common lunatic vandal, Oscar stood in the street and howled through the flames at a face peering out from a shattered upstairs window, delivering one of his Billy Sunday style sermons on morality and justice.

The nut of his flame-enraged text, as I recall, was this mind-bending chunk of eternal d.a.m.nation from Luke 11:46 -- a direct quote from Jesus Christ: "And he said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers, for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers."

The Lawn of Fire was Oscar's answer to the Ku Klux Klan's burning cross, and he derived the same demonic satisfaction from doing it.

"Did you see his face?" he shouted as we screeched off at top speed toward Hollywood. "That corrupt old fool! I know know he recognized me but he'll never admit it! No officer of the court would set a Judge's front yard on fire -- the whole system would break down if lawyers could get away with crazy s.h.i.+t like this." he recognized me but he'll never admit it! No officer of the court would set a Judge's front yard on fire -- the whole system would break down if lawyers could get away with crazy s.h.i.+t like this."

I agreed. It is not my wont to disagree with even a criminally insane attorney on questions of basic law. But in truth it never occurred to me that Oscar was either insane or a criminal, given the generally fascist, Nixonian context of those angry years.

In an era when the Vice President of the United States held court in Was.h.i.+ngton to accept payoffs from his former va.s.sals in the form of big wads of one hundred dollar bills -- and when the President himself routinely held secretly tape-recorded meetings with his top aides in the Oval Office to plot illegal wiretaps, political burglaries and other gross felonies in the name of a "silent majority," it was hard to feel anything more than a flash of high, nervous humor at the sight of some acid-bent lawyer setting fire to a Judge's front yard at four o'clock in the morning.

I might even be tempted to justify a thing like that -- but of course it would be wrong. . . it would be wrong. . . And my attorney was Not a Crook and to the best of my knowledge, his mother was just as much "a saint" as Richard Nixon's. And my attorney was Not a Crook and to the best of my knowledge, his mother was just as much "a saint" as Richard Nixon's.

Indeed. And now -- as an almost perfect tribute to every icepick ever wielded in the name of Justice -- I want to enter into the permanent record, at this point, as a strange but unchallenged fact that Oscar Z. Acosta was never disbarred from the practice of law in the state of California -- and ex-President Richard Nixon was. was.

There are some some things, apparently, that not even lawyers will tolerate; and in a naturally unjust world where the image of "Justice" is honored for being blind, even a blind pig will find an acorn once in a while. things, apparently, that not even lawyers will tolerate; and in a naturally unjust world where the image of "Justice" is honored for being blind, even a blind pig will find an acorn once in a while.

Or maybe not -- because Oscar was eventually hurt far worse by professional ostracism than Nixon was hurt by disbarment. The Great Banshee screamed for them both at almost the same time -- for entirely different reasons, but with ominously similar results.

Except that Richard Nixon got rich from his crimes, and Oscar Acosta got killed. The wheels of justice grind small and queer in this life and if they seem occasionally unbalanced or even stupid and capricious in their grinding, my own midnight guess is that they were probably fixed from the start. And any Judge who can safely slide into full pension retirement without having to look back on anything worse in the way of criminal vengeance than a few scorched lawns is a man who got off easy.

There is, after all, considerable work and risk -- and even a certain art -- to the torching of a half-acre lawn without also destroying the house or exploding every car in the driveway. It would be a lot easier to simply make a funeral pyre of the whole place and leave the lawn for dilettantes.

That's how Oscar viewed arson -- anything worth doing is worth doing well -- and I'd watched enough of his fiery work to know he was right. If he was a King-h.e.l.l Pyromaniac, he was also a gut politician and occasionally a very skilled artist in the style and tone of his torchings.

Like most lawyers with an IQ higher than sixty, Oscar learned one definition of Justice in Law school, and a very different one in the courtroom. He got his degree at some night school on Post Street in San Francisco, while working as a copy boy for the Hearst Examiner. Examiner. And for a while he was very proud to be a lawyer -- for the same reasons he'd felt proud to be a missionary and lead clarinet man in the leper colony band. And for a while he was very proud to be a lawyer -- for the same reasons he'd felt proud to be a missionary and lead clarinet man in the leper colony band.

But by the time I first met him in the summer of 1967, he was long past what he called his "puppy love trip with The Law." It had gone the same way of his earlier missionary zeal, and after one year of casework at an East Oakland "poverty law center" he was ready to dump Holmes and Brandeis for Huey Newton and a Black Panther style of dealing with the laws and courts of America.

When he came booming into a bar called Daisy Duck in Aspen and announced that he was the trouble we'd all been waiting for, he was definitely into the politics of confrontation -- and on all fronts: in the bars or the courts or even the streets, if necessary.

Oscar was not into serious street-fighting, but he was h.e.l.l on wheels in a bar brawl. Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach -- but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs and a de facto suicidal conviction that he will will die at the age of thirty-three -- just like Jesus Christ -- you have a serious piece of work on your hands. Specially if the b.a.s.t.a.r.d is die at the age of thirty-three -- just like Jesus Christ -- you have a serious piece of work on your hands. Specially if the b.a.s.t.a.r.d is already already thirty-three and a half years old with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded .357 Magnum in his belt, a hatchet-wielding Chicano bodyguard on his elbow at all times, and a disconcerting habit of projectile-vomiting geysers of pure red blood off the front porch every thirty or forty minutes, or whenever his malignant ulcer can't handle any more raw tequila. thirty-three and a half years old with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded .357 Magnum in his belt, a hatchet-wielding Chicano bodyguard on his elbow at all times, and a disconcerting habit of projectile-vomiting geysers of pure red blood off the front porch every thirty or forty minutes, or whenever his malignant ulcer can't handle any more raw tequila.

This was the Brown Buffalo in the full crazed flower of his prime -- a man, indeed, for all seasons. And it was somewhere in the middle of his thirty-third year, in fact, when he came out to Colorado -- with his faithful bodyguard, Frank -- to rest for a while after his grueling campaign for Sheriff of Los Angeles County, which he lost by a million or so votes. But in defeat, Oscar had managed to create an instant political base for himself in the vast Chicano barrio of East Los Angeles -- where even the most conservative of the old-line "Mexican-Americans" were suddenly calling themselves "Chicanos" and getting their first taste of tear gas at "La Raza" demonstrations, which Oscar was quickly learning to use as a fire and brimstone forum to feature himself as the main spokesman for a mushrooming "Brown Power" movement that the LAPD called more dangerous than the Black Panthers.

Which was probably true, at the time -- but in retrospect it sounds a bit different than it did back in 1969 when the sheriff was sending out fifteen or twenty helicopter sorties a night to scan the rooftops and backyards of the barrio with huge sweeping searchlights that drove Oscar and his people into fits of blind rage every time they got nailed in a pool of blazing white light with a joint in one hand and a machete in the other.

But that is another and very long story -- and since I've already written it once ("Strange Rumblings in Aztlan," RS81) and came close to getting my throat slit in the process, I think we'll just ease off and pa.s.s on it for right now.

The sad tale of Oscar's fall from grace in the barrio is still rife with bad blood and ugly paranoia. He was too stunned to fight back in the time-honored style of a professional politician. He was also broke, divorced, depressed and so deep in public disgrace in the wake of his "high speed drug bust" that not even junkies would have him for an attorney.

In a word, he and his dream of "one million brown buffalos" were finished finished in East L.A. . . and everywhere else where it counted, for that matter, so Oscar "took off" once again, and once again with a head full of acid. in East L.A. . . and everywhere else where it counted, for that matter, so Oscar "took off" once again, and once again with a head full of acid.

But. . .

Peac.o.c.ks Can't Live at This Alt.i.tude. . . New Home for Ebb Tide, False Dawn in Aztlan and a Chain of Bull Maggots on the Neck of the Fat Spic from Riverbank. . . May Leeches Crawl on his Soul until the Rivers Flow Up from the Sea and the Gra.s.s Grows Down into h.e.l.l. . . Beware of 300-Pound Samoan Attorneys Bearing Gifts of LSD-25 Follow not truth too near the heels, lest it dash out thy teeth.

-- George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum Jacula Prudentum Well. . . it is not an easy thing to sit here and keep a straight face while even considering the notion that there is any connection at all between Oscar's sorry fate and his lifelong devotion to defending the truth at all costs. There are a lot of people still wandering around, especially in places like San Francisco and East L.A., who would like nothing better than to dash out Oscar's teeth with a ball-peen hammer for all the weird and costly lies he laid on them at one point or another in his frenzied a.s.saults on the way to his place in the sun. He never denied he was a lying pig who would use any means to justify his better end. Even his friends felt the sting. Yet there were times when he took himself as seriously as any other bush league Mao or Moses, and in moments like these he was capable of rare insights and a naive sort of grace in his dealings with people that often touched on n.o.bility. At its best, the Brown Buffalo shuffle was a match for Muhammad Ali's.

After I'd known him for only three days he made me a solemn gift of a crude wooden idol that I am still not sure he didn't occasionally wors.h.i.+p in secret when not in the presence of the dreaded "white a.s.s gabancos." In a paragraph near the end of his autobiography, he describes that strangely touching transfer far better than I can.

"I opened my beat-up suitcase and took out my wooden idol. I had him wrapped in a bright red and yellow cloth. A San Bias Indian had given him to me when I left Panama. I called him Ebb Tide. He was made of hard mahogany. An eighteen-inch G.o.d without eyes, without a mouth and without a s.e.xual organ. Perhaps the sculptor had the same hang-up about drawing the body from the waist down as I'd had in Miss Rollins' fourth-grade cla.s.s. Ebb Tide was my oldest possession. A string of small, yellowed wild pig's fangs hung from its neck."

Ebb Tide still hangs on a nail just above my living room window. I can see him from where I sit now, scrawling these G.o.dd.a.m.n final desperate lines before my head can explode like a ball of magnesium tossed into a bucket of water. I have never been sure exactly what kind of luck Ebb Tide was bringing down on me, over the years -- but I've never taken the little b.a.s.t.a.r.d down or even thought about it, so he must be paying his way. He is perched just in front of the peac.o.c.k perch outside, and right now there are two high-blue reptilian heads peering over his narrow wooden shoulders.

Does anybody out there believe that?

No?

Well. . . peac.o.c.ks can't live at this alt.i.tude anyway, like Doberman pinschers, sea snakes and gun-toting Chicano missionaries with bad-acid breath.

Why does a hea.r.s.e horse snicker, hauling a lawyer away?

-- Carl Sandburg Things were not going well in San Francisco or L.A. at that grim point in Oscar's time, either. To him, it must have seemed like open season on every Brown Buffalo west of the Continental Divide.

The only place he felt safe was down south on the warm foreign soil of the old country. But when he fled back to Mazatlan this time, it was not just to rest but to brood -- and to plot what would be his final crazed leap for the great skyhook.

It would also turn out to be an act of such monumental perversity not even that gentle presence of Ebb Tide could change my sudden and savage decision that the Treacherous b.a.s.t.a.r.d should have his nuts ripped off with a plastic fork -- and then fed like big meat grapes to my peac.o.c.ks.

The move he made this time was straight out of Jekyll and Hyde -- the Brown Buffalo suddenly transmogrified into the form of a rabid hyena. And the b.a.s.t.a.r.d compounded his madness by hiding out in the low-rent bowels of Mazatlan like some half-mad leper gone over the brink after yet another debilitating attack of string warts and Herpes Simplex lesions. . .

This ugly moment came just as my second book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, was only a week or so away from going to press. We were in the countdown stage and there is no way for anybody who hasn't been there to understand the tension of having a new book was only a week or so away from going to press. We were in the countdown stage and there is no way for anybody who hasn't been there to understand the tension of having a new book almost almost on the presses, but not quite there. The only thing that stood between me and publication was a last minute a.s.sault on the very essence of the story by the publishers' libel lawyers. The book was malignant from start to finish, they said, with grievous libels that were totally indefensible. No publisher in his right mind would risk the nightmare of doomed litigation that a book like this was certain to drag us all into. on the presses, but not quite there. The only thing that stood between me and publication was a last minute a.s.sault on the very essence of the story by the publishers' libel lawyers. The book was malignant from start to finish, they said, with grievous libels that were totally indefensible. No publisher in his right mind would risk the nightmare of doomed litigation that a book like this was certain to drag us all into.

Which was true, on one level, but on another it seemed like a harmless joke -- because almost every one of the most devastating libels they cited involved my old buddy, O. Z. Acosta; a fellow author, prominent Los Angeles attorney and an officer of many courts. Specifically they advised: We have read the above ma.n.u.script as requested. Our princ.i.p.al legal objection is to the description of the author's attorney as using and offering for sale dangerous drugs as well as indulging in other criminal acts while under the influence of such drugs. Although this attorney is not named, he is identified with some detail. Consequently, this material should be deleted as libelous.

In addition, we have the following specific comments: Page 3: The author's attorney's attempt to break and enter and threats (sic) to bomb a salesman's residence is libelous and should be deleted. Page 4: This page suggests that the author's attorney was driving at an excessive speed while drunk all of which is libelous and should be deleted. Page 6: The incident in which the author's attorney advised the author to drive at top speed is libelous and should be deleted. The same applies to the attorney's being party to a fraud at the hotel. Page 31: The statement that the author's attorney will be disbarred is libelous and should be deleted. Page 40: The incident in which the author and his attorney impersonated police officers is libelous and should be deleted. Page 41: The reference to the attorney's -----* being a "junkie" and shooting people is libelous and should be deleted unless it may be proven true. Page 48: The incident in which the author's attorney offers heroin for sale is libelous and should be deleted.

We do not advise -------- to allow any material in this ma.n.u.script noted above as libelous to remain based upon expectancy of proving that'll is true by the author's testimony. Inasmuch as the author admits being under the influence of illegal drugs at most if not all times, proof of truth would be extremely difficult through him.

* Deleted at the insistence of ROLLING STONE ROLLING STONE'S attorney.

"b.a.l.l.s," I told them. "We'll just have Oscar sign a release. He's no more concerned about this 'libel' bulls.h.i.+t than I am.

"And besides, truth is an absolute defense against libel, anyway. . . Jesus, you don't understand what kind of a monster we're dealing with. You should read the parts I left out. . ."

But the libel wizards were not impressed -- especially since we were heaping all this libelous abuse on a fellow attorney. Unless we got a signed release from Oscar, the book would not go to press.

Okay, I said. But let's do it quick. He's down in Mazatlan now. Send the G.o.dd.a.m.n thing by air express and he'll sign it and s.h.i.+p it right back.

I think we are in Rats Alley where the dead men lost their bones, -- T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land The Waste Land Indeed. So they sent the release off at once. . . and Oscar refused to sign it -- but not for any reason a New York libel lawyer could possibly understand. He was, as I'd said, not concerned at all by the libels. Of course they were all true, he said when I finally reached him by telephone at his room in the Hotel Synaloa.

The only thing that bothered him -- bothered him very badly -- was the fact that I'd repeatedly described him as a 300-pound Samoan.

"What kind of Journalist are you?" he screamed at me. "Don't you have any respect for the truth? I can sink that whole publis.h.i.+ng house for defaming me, defaming me, trying to pa.s.s me off as one of those waterhead South Sea mongrels." trying to pa.s.s me off as one of those waterhead South Sea mongrels."

The libel lawyers were stunned into paranoid silence. "Was it either some kind of arcane legal trick," they wondered, "or was this dope-addled freak really crazy enough to insist on having himself formally identified for all time, with one of the most depraved and degenerate figures in American literature?"

Should his angry threats and demands conceivably be taken seriously? Was it possible that a well-known practicing attorney might not only freely admit to all these heinous crimes, but insist that every foul detail be doc.u.mented as the absolute truth?

"Why not?" Oscar answered. And the only way he'd sign the release, he added, was in exchange for a firm guarantee from the lawyers that both his name and a suitable photograph of himself be prominently displayed on the book's dust cover.

They had never had to cope with a thing like this -- a presumably sane attorney who flatly refused to release any other version of his clearly criminal behavior, except the abysmal naked truth. The concession he was willing to make had to do with his ident.i.ty throughout the entire book as a "300 pound Samoan." But he could grit his teeth and tolerate that, he said, only because he understood that there was no way to make that many changes at that stage of the deadline without tearing up half the book. In exchange, however, he wanted a formal letter guaranteeing that he would be properly identified on the book jacket The lawyers would have no part of it. There was no precedent anywhere in the law for a bizarre situation like this. . . but as the deadline pressures mounted and Oscar refused to bend, it became more and more obvious that the only choice except compromise was to scuttle the book entirely. . . and if that that happened, I warned them, I had enough plastic forks to mutilate every libel lawyer in New York. happened, I warned them, I had enough plastic forks to mutilate every libel lawyer in New York.

That seemed to settle the issue in favor of a last-minute' compromise, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was finally sent to the printer with Oscar clearly identified on the back as the certified living model for the monstrous "300-pound Samoan attorney" who would soon be a far more public figure than any of us would have guessed at the time. was finally sent to the printer with Oscar clearly identified on the back as the certified living model for the monstrous "300-pound Samoan attorney" who would soon be a far more public figure than any of us would have guessed at the time.

Alcohol, Has.h.i.+sh, Prussic Acid, Strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

-- EMERSON, Society and Solitude Society and Solitude The libel lawyers have never understood what Oscar had in mind -- and, at the time, I don't understand it myself -- one of the darker skills involved in the kind of journalism I normally get involved with has to do with ability to write the Truth about "criminals" without getting them busted -- and, in the eyes of the law, any any person committing a crime is criminal: whether it's a h.e.l.l's Angel laying an oil slick on a freeway exit to send a pursuing motorcycle cop cras.h.i.+ng over the high side, a presidential candidate smoking a joint in his hotel room, or a good friend who happens to be a lawyer, an arsonist and a serious drug abuser. person committing a crime is criminal: whether it's a h.e.l.l's Angel laying an oil slick on a freeway exit to send a pursuing motorcycle cop cras.h.i.+ng over the high side, a presidential candidate smoking a joint in his hotel room, or a good friend who happens to be a lawyer, an arsonist and a serious drug abuser.

The line between writing truth and providing evidence is very, very thin -- but for a journalist working constantly among highly paranoid criminals, it is also the line between trust and suspicion. And that is the difference between having free access to the truth and being treated like a spy. There is no such thing as "forgiveness" on that level; one f.u.c.k-up will send you straight back to sportswriting -- if you're lucky.

In Oscar's case, my only reason for describing him in the book as a 300-pound Samoan instead of a 250-pound Chicano lawyer was to protect him from the wrath of the L.A. cops and the whole California legal establishment he was constantly at war with. It would not serve either one of our interests, I felt, for Oscar to get busted or disbarred because of something I wrote about him. I had my reputation to protect.

The libel lawyers understood that much; what worried them was that I hadn't protected "my attorney" well enough to protect also the book publisher from a libel suit -- just in case my attorney was as crazy as he appeared to be in the ma.n.u.script they'd just vetoed. . . or maybe he was crazy like a fox, they hinted; he was, after all an attorney attorney -- who'd presumably worked just as hard and for just as many long years as -- who'd presumably worked just as hard and for just as many long years as they they had -- to earn his license to steal -- and it was inconceivable to them that one of their own kind, as it were, would give all that up on what appeared to be a whim. No, they said, it had -- to earn his license to steal -- and it was inconceivable to them that one of their own kind, as it were, would give all that up on what appeared to be a whim. No, they said, it must must be a trap; not even a "Brown Power" lawyer could afford to laugh at the risk of almost certain disbarment. be a trap; not even a "Brown Power" lawyer could afford to laugh at the risk of almost certain disbarment.

Indeed. And they were at least half right -- which is not a bad average for lawyers -- because Oscar Z. Acosta, Chicano lawyer, very definitely could not not afford the s.h.i.+train of suicidal publicity that he was doing everything possible to bring down on himself. There are a lot of afford the s.h.i.+train of suicidal publicity that he was doing everything possible to bring down on himself. There are a lot of nice nice ways to behave like a criminal -- but hiring a camera to have yourself photographed doing it in the road is not one of them. It would have taken a reputation as formidable as Melvin Belli's to survive the kind of grossly illegal behavior that Oscar was effectively admitting by signing that libel release. He might as well have burned his lawyer's license on the steps of the Superior Court building in downtown L.A. ways to behave like a criminal -- but hiring a camera to have yourself photographed doing it in the road is not one of them. It would have taken a reputation as formidable as Melvin Belli's to survive the kind of grossly illegal behavior that Oscar was effectively admitting by signing that libel release. He might as well have burned his lawyer's license on the steps of the Superior Court building in downtown L.A.

That is what the Ivy League libel lawyers in New York could not accept. They knew knew what that license was worth -- at least to them; it averaged out to about $150 an hour -- even for a borderline psychotic, as long as he had the credentials. what that license was worth -- at least to them; it averaged out to about $150 an hour -- even for a borderline psychotic, as long as he had the credentials.

And Oscar had them -- not because his father and grandfather had gone to Yale or Harvard Law; he'd paid his dues at night school, the only Chicano in his cla.s.s, and his record in the courtroom was better than that of most of his colleagues who called him a disgrace to their venal profession.

Which may have been true, for whatever it's worth. . . but what none of us knew at the time of the Great Madness that came so close to making Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas incurably unfit for publication was that we were no longer dealing with O.Z. Acosta, Attorney-at-Law -- but with Zeta, the King of Brown Buffalos. incurably unfit for publication was that we were no longer dealing with O.Z. Acosta, Attorney-at-Law -- but with Zeta, the King of Brown Buffalos.

Last Train for the Top of the Mountain, Last Leap for the Great Skyhook. . . Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish. . . He Was Ugly & Vicious and He Sold Little Babies to Sand-n.i.g.g.e.rs. . . Mutant Rumors on the Weird Grapevine, Wild Ghosts on the Bimini Run, Lights In Fat City. . . No End to the Story and No Grave for the Brown Buffalo In retrospect it is hard to know exactly when Oscar decided to quit the Law just as finally as he'd once quit being a Baptist missionary -- but it was obviously a lot earlier than even his few close friends realized, until long after he'd already made the move in his mind, to a new and higher place. The crazy attorney whose "suicidal behavior" so baffled the N.Y. libel lawyers was only the locustlike sh.e.l.l of a thirty-six-year-old neo-prophet who was already long overdue for his gig at the top of the Mountain.

There was no more time to be wasted in the company of lepers and lawyers. The hour had finally struck for the fat spic from Riverbank to start acting like that one man in every century "chosen to speak for his people."

None of this terminal madness was easy to see at the time -- not even for me, and I knew him as well as anyone. . . But not well enough, apparently, to understand the almost desperate sense of failure and loss that he felt when he was suddenly confronted with the stark possibility that he had never really really been chosen to speak for anybody, except maybe himself -- and even that was beginning to look like a halfway impossible task, in the short time he felt he had left. been chosen to speak for anybody, except maybe himself -- and even that was beginning to look like a halfway impossible task, in the short time he felt he had left.

I had never taken his burning bush trip very seriously -- and I still have moments of doubt about how seriously he took it himself. . . They are very long long moments, sometimes; and as a matter of fact I think I feel one coming on right now. . . We should have castrated that brain-damaged thief! That shyster! That blasphemous freak! He was ugly and greasy and he still owes me thousands of dollars! moments, sometimes; and as a matter of fact I think I feel one coming on right now. . . We should have castrated that brain-damaged thief! That shyster! That blasphemous freak! He was ugly and greasy and he still owes me thousands of dollars!

The truth was not in him, G.o.dd.a.m.nit! He was put on this earth for no reason at all except to s.h.i.+t in every nest he could con his way into -- but only after robbing them first, and selling the babies to sand-n.i.g.g.e.rs. If that treacherous fist-f.u.c.ker ever comes back to life, he'll wish we'd had the good sense to nail him up on a frozen telephone pole for his thirty-third birthday present.

DO NOT COME BACK OSCAR! Wherever you are -- stay there! There's no room for you here anymore. Not after all this maudlin gibberish I've written about you. . . And besides, we have Werner Erhard now. So BURROW DEEP, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d, and take all that poison fat with you!

Cazart! And how's that for a left-handed whipsong?

Nevermind. There is no more time for questions -- or answers either, for that matter. And I was never much good at this kind of thing, anyway.

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

-- WILLIAM S SHAKESPEARE, King Henry VI King Henry VI Well. . . so much for whipsongs. n.o.body laughed when Big Bill sat down to play. He was not into filigree when it came to dealing with lawyers.

And neither am I, at this point. That last outburst was probably unnecessary, but what the h.e.l.l? Let them drink Drano if they can't take a joke. I'm tired of wallowing around in this G.o.dd.a.m.n thing.

What began as a quick and stylish epitaph for my allegedly erstwhile 300-pound Samoan attorney has long since gone out of control. Not even Oscar would have wanted an obituary with no end, at least not until he was legally dead, and that will take four more years.

Until then -- and probably for many years afterward -- the Weird Grapevine will not wither for lack of bulletins, warnings and other twisted rumors of the latest Brown Buffalo sightings. He will be seen at least once in Calcutta, buying nine-year-old girls out of cages on the White Slave Market. . . and also in Houston, tending bar at a roadhouse on South Main that was once the Blue Fox. . . or perhaps once again on the midnight run to Bimini; standing tall on his own hind legs in the c.o.c.kpit of a fifty-foot black Cigarette boat with a silver Uzi in one hand and a magnum of smack in the other, always running ninety miles an hour with no lights and howling Old Testament gibberish at the top of his bleeding lungs. . .

It might even come to pa.s.s that he will suddenly appear on my porch in Woody Creek on some moonless night when the peac.o.c.ks are screeching with l.u.s.t. . . Maybe so, and that is one ghost who will always be welcome in this house, even with a head full of acid and a chain of bull-maggots around his neck.