James Kottak

The History of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream … Part Two - But this is a hard thing to do, and in the end I found myself imposing an essentially fictional framework on what began as a piece of straight/crazy journalism. True Gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he’s writing it—or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character. The American print media are not ready for this kind of thing, yet. Rolling Stone was probably the only magazine in America where I could get the Vegas book published. I sent Sports Illustrated 2500 words—instead of the 250 they asked for—and my manuscript was aggressively rejected. They refused to even pay my minimum expenses … But to hell with all that. I seem to be drifting away from the point—that Fear & Loathing is not what I thought it would be. I began writing it during a week of hard typewriter nights in a room at the Ramada Inn—in a place called Arcadia, California—up the road from Pasadena & right across the street from the Santa Anita racetrack. I was there during the first week of the Spring Racing—and the rooms all around me were jammed with people I couldn’t quite believe. Heavy track buffs, horse trainers, ranch owners, jockeys & their women … I was lost in that swarm, sleeping most of each day and writing all night on the Salazar article. But each night, around dawn, I would knock off the Salazar work and spend an hour or so, cooling out, by letting my head unwind and my fingers run wild on the big black Selectric … jotting down notes about the weird trip to Vegas. It had worked out nicely, in terms of the Salazar piece—plenty of hard straight talk about who was lying and who wasn’t, and Oscar had finally relaxed enough to talk to me straight. Flashing across the desert at 110 in a big red convertible with the top down, there is not much danger of being bugged or overheard. But we stayed in Vegas a bit longer than we’d planned to. Or at least I did. Oscar had to get back for a nine o’clock court appearance on Monday. So he took a plane and I was left alone out there—just me and a massive hotel bill that I knew I couldn’t pay, and the treacherous reality of that scene caused me to spend about 36 straight hours in my room at the Mint Hotel … writing feverishly in a notebook about a nasty situation that I thought I might not get away from. These notes were the genesis of Fear & Loathing. After my escape from Nevada and all through the tense work week that followed (spending all my afternoons on the grim streets of East LA and my nights at the typewriter in that Ramada Inn hideout) … my only loose & human moments would come around dawn when I could relax and fuck around with this slow-building, stone-crazy Vegas story.