This is no way to work on a very volatile & very complex story. So one afternoon I got Oscar in my rented car and drove him over to the Beverly Hills Hotel -- away from his bodyguards, etc. -- and told him I was getting a bit wiggy from the pressure; it was like being on stage all the time, or maybe in the midst of a prison riot. He agreed, but the nature of his position as “leader of the militants” made it impossible for him to be openly friendly with a gabacho.

I understood this. . . and just about then, I remembered that another old friend, now working for Sports Illustrated, had asked me if I felt like going out to Vegas for the weekend, at their expense, and writing a few words about a motorcycle race. This seemed like a good excuse to get out of LA for a few days, and if I took Oscar along it would also give us time to talk and sort out the evil realities of the Salazar Murder story.

So I called Sports Illustrated -- from the patio of the Polo Lounge -- and said I was ready to do the “Vegas thing.” They agreed. . . and from here on in there is no point in running down details, because they're all in the book.

More or less. . . and this qualifier is the essence of what, for no particular reason, I've decided to call Gonzo Journalism. It is a style of “reporting” based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism -- and the best journalists have always known this.

Which is not to say that Fiction is necessarily “more true” than Journalism -- or vice versa -- but that both “fiction” and “journalism” are artificial categories; and that both forms, at their best, are only two different means to the same end. This is getting pretty heavy. . . so I should cut back and explain, at this point, that Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas is a failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism. My idea was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication -- without editing. That way, I felt, the eye & mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera. The writing would be selective & necessarily interpretive -- but once the image was written, the words would be final; in the same way that a Cartier-Bresson photograph is always (he says) the full-frame negative. No alterations in the darkroom, no cutting or cropping, no spotting. . . no editing.