Maybe so, I thought. Maybe this kind of thing is standard procedure in this town
I swung in behind the van and hit the brakes just long enough for my attorney to jump out. “Don’t take any guff from these swine,” I yelled. “Remember, if you have any trouble you can always send a telegram to the Right People.”
He grinned. “Yeah . . . Explaining my Position,” he said. “Some asshole wrote a poem about that once. It’s probably good advice, if you have shit for brains.” He waved me off.
“Right,” I said, moving out. I’d already spotted a break in the big hurricane fence-and now, with the Whale in low gear, I went for it. Nobody seemed to be chasing me. I couldn’t understand it. I glanced in the mirror and saw my attorney climbing into the plane, no sign of a struggle . . . and then I was through the gate and out into the early morning traffic on Paradise Road.
I took a fast right on Russell, then a left onto Maryland Parkway . . . and suddenly I was cruising in warm anonym ity past the campus of the University of Las Vegas . . . no tension on these faces; I stopped at a red light and got lost, for a moment, in a sunburst of flesh in the cross-walk: fine sinewy thighs, pink mini-skirts, ripe young nipples, sleeveless blouses, long sweeps of blonde hair, pink lips and blue eyes- all the hallmarks of a dangerously innocent culture.
I was tempted to pull over and start mumbling obscene en treaties: “Hey, Sweetie, let’s you and me get weird. Jump into this hotdog Caddy and we’ll flash over to my suite at the Flamingo, load up on ether and behave like wild animals in my private, kidney-shaped pool ..”
Sure we will, I thought. But by this time I was far down the parkway, easing into the turn lane for a left at Flamingo Road. Back to the hotel, to take stock. There was every reason to believe I was heading for trouble, that I’d pushed my luck a bit far. I’d abused every rule Vegas lived by-burning locals, abusing the tourists, terrifying the help.
The only hope now, I felt, was the possibility that we’d gone to such excess, with our gig, that nobody in a position to bring the hammer down on us could possibly believe it. Particularily not since we’d signed in with the Police Conference. When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it in heavy. Don’t waste any time with cheap shucks and misde minors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies.
The mentality of Las Vegas is so grossly atavistic that a really massive crime often slips by unrecognized. One of my neighbors recently spent a week in the Vegas jail for “vagrancy.” He’s about twenty years old: Long hair, Levi jacket, napsack – an out-front drifter, a straight Road Person. Totally harmless; he just wanders around the country looking whatever it was that we all thought we’d nailed down in in the Sixties-sort of an early Bob Zimmerman trip.
On a trip from Chicago to L.A., he got curious about Vegas and decided to have a look at it. Just passing through, strolling and digging the sights on the Strip . . . no hurry, why rush? He was standing on a street-corner near the Circus Circus, watching the multi-colored fountain, when the cop-cruiser pulled up.
Wham. Straight to jail. No phone call, no lawyer, no charge. “They put me in the car and took me down to the station.” he said. “They took me into a big room full of people to take off all my clothes before they booked me. I was standing in front of a big desk, about six feet tall, with a cop sitting behind it and looking down at me like some kind of medieval judge.
“The room was full of people. Maybe a dozen prisoners; twice that many cops, and about ten policewomen. You had to walk out in the middle of the room, then take everything out of your pockets and put it up on the desk and then strip naked-with everybody watching you.