“Better to call room service,” he said. “We can get the crab looey and a quart of Christian Brothers muscatel for about twenty bucks.
“No!” I said. “We must get out of this place. I need air. Let’s drive up to Reno and get a big tuna fish salad . . . hell, it won’t take long. Only about four hundred miles; no traffic out there on the desert . . . ”
“Forget it,” he said. “That’s Army territory. Bomb tests, nerve gas – we’d never make it.”
We wound up at a place called The Big Flip about halfway downtown. I had a “New York steak” for $1.88. My attorney ordered the “Coyote Bush Basket” for $2.09 . . . and after that we drank off a pot of watery “Golden West” coffee and watched four boozed-up cowboy types kick a faggot half to death between the pinball machines.
“The action never stops in this town,” said my attorney as we shuffled out to the car. “A man with the right contacts could probably pick up all the fresh adrenochrome he wanted, if he hung around here for a while.”
I agreed, but I wasn’t quite up to it, right then. I hadn’t slept for something like eighty hours, and that fearful ordeal with the drug had left me completely exhausted . . . tomorrow we would have to get serious. The drug conference was scheduled to kick off at noon . . . and we were still not sure how to handle it. So we drove back to the hotel and watched a British horror film on the late show.
6. Getting Down to Business . . . Opening Day at the Drug Convention
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“On behalf of the prosecuting attorneys of this county, I welcome you.”
We sat in the rear fringe of a crowd of about 1500 in the main ballroom of the Dunes Hotel. Far up in front of the room, barely visible from the rear, the executive director of the National District Attorneys’ Association – a middle-aged, well-groomed, successful GOP businessman type named Pat rick Healy-was opening their Third National Institute on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. His remarks reached us by way of a big, low-fidelity speaker mounted on a steel pole in our corner. Perhaps a dozen others were spotted around the room, all facing the rear and looming over the crowd . . . so hat no matter where you sat or even tried to hide, you were ways looking down the muzzle of a big speaker.
This produced an odd effect. People in each section of the Lroom tended to stare at the nearest voice-box, instead of watching the distant figure of whoever was actually talking up front, on the podium. This 1935 style of speaker placement totally depersonalized the room. There was something is and authoritarian about it.
Whoever set up that system was probably some kind of Sheriff’s auxiliary technician on leave from a drive-in theater in Muskogee, where the management couldn’t afford individual car speakers and relied on ten huge horns, mounted ontelephone poles in the parking area.
A year earlier I had been to the Sky River Rock Festival in rural Washington, where a dozen stone-broke freaks from the Seattle Liberation Front had assembled a sound sys tem that carried every small note of an acoustic guitar – even a cough or the sound of a boot dropping on the stage – to half – deaf acid victims huddled under bushes a half mile away.
But the best technicians available to the National DAs’ convention in Vegas apparently couldn’t handle it. Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S. Grant might have triggered up to address his troops during the Seige of Vicksburg. The voices from up front crackled with a fuzzy, high-pitched urgency, and the delay was just enough to keep the words disconcertingly out of phase with the speaker’s ges tures.
“We must come to terms with the Drug Culture in this country! . . . country . . . country . . .” These echoes drifted back to the rear in confused waves. “The reefer butt is called a ‘roach’ because it resembles a cockroach . . .cockroach . . . cockroach ..