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.

By the time I got back to the Rolling Stone Hq. in San Francisco, the Salazar story was winding out at around 19,000 words, and the strange Vegas “fantasy” was running on its own spaced energy and pushing 5000 words -- with no end in sight and no real reason to continue working on it, except the pure pleasure of unwinding on paper. It was sort of an exercise -- like Bolero and it might have stayed that way -- if Jarin Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone, hadn't liked the first 20 or so jangled pages enough to take it seriously on its own terms and tentatively schedule it for publication-- which gave me the push I needed to keep working on it.

So now, six months later, the ugly bastard is finished. And I like it -- despite the fact that I failed at what I was trying to do. As true Gonzo Journalism, this doesn't work at all -- and even if it did, I couldn't possibly admit it. Only a goddamn lunatic would write a thing like this and then claim it was true. The week the first section of Fear & Loathing appeared in Rolling Stone I found myself applying for White House press credentials -- a plastic pass that would give me the run of the White House, along with at least theoretical access to the big oval room where Nixon hangs out, pacing back & forth on those fine thick taxpayers' carpets and pondering Sunday's pointspread. (Nixon is a serious pro football freak. He and I are old buddies on this front: We once spent a long night together on the Thruway from Boston to Manchester, disecting the pro & con strategy of the Oakland-Green Bay Super Bowl game. It was the only time I've ever seen the bugger relaxed -- laughing, whacking me on the knee as he recalled Max McGee's one-handed catch for the back-breaking touchdown. I was impressed. It was like talking to Owsley about Acid.)

The trouble with Nixon is that he's a serious politics junkie. He's totally hooked. . . and like any other junkie, he's a bummer to have around: Especially as President.

And so much for all that. . . I have all of 1972 to fuck around with Nixon, so why hassle it here?

Anyway, the main point I want to make about Fear & Loathing is that although it's not what I meant it to be, it's still so complex in its failure that I feel I can take the risk of defending it as a first, gimped effort in a direction that what Tom Wolfe calls “The New Journalism” has been flirting with for almost a decade.