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.

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.