(Audio) Reflection: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Part I

Pretty funny about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  Now that I’ve seen the movie (did I watch it twice?), and read the book as well, the audiobook seems eerily sedate.  Or should I say, nothing in the book so far seems utterly unreasonable.  It’s amazing how much I have come to accept Thompson’s narrative of his trip to Las Vegas, even though much of the narrative is the narrative of what he was imagining and feeling in his own mind.

But does that mean that Thompson has succeeded, or failed?  The initial strangeness of the story comes from the weird things that Thompson and his lawyer are hallucinating during the trip.  And since the hallucinations not unexpectedly call forth paranoid and gut instincts, it would not be surprising that they react the way they do.  But do they?  Did they?

Because the other half of this equation is exactly what I mentioned to begin with:  The eerie sedateness with which I now react to the story.  Within the story, the characters act as if nothing is very surprising.  They’re a bit startled, of course, when hotel staff morph into lizards and so on.  But they handle it with surprising aplomb.  They never look at someone and say, “My God, you’ve turned into a giant lizard!”  They may talk to one another about what they’re experiencing; but they don’t talk to the others about it.

Or do they talk to one another?  Maybe—they could talk softly to one another, under their breath, about the weird goings on all around them.  And maybe they do.  But how would we know?  Can we trust much of anything that Thompson tells us in this narrative?

In Part I of the book, he’s gone to Las Vegas to cover a desert motorcycle (and dune-buggy) race.  My research says he’d nailed an assignment to write 2,500 words of captions for the photographs.  He did so, but his contribution was rejected by the magazine.

If we are to believe the book, the race began, and within 30 minutes the entire surrounding area was enveloped in a huge dust cloud.   That’s the last he saw of the race.  Part I of the book, far from 10 pages of captions, runs 100 pages, describing some possible facts but more often the anxieties of Thompson and his attorney.

Believable—if we believe that covering the race and subjecting oneself to Las Vegas in the wrong frame of mind could call forth one’s inner demons, especially under the influence of every conceivable illegal substance.

But would a journalist covering a two-day race really take along a trunk load of highly illegal substances, with the intention of becoming utterly bonkers even before arriving, and staying that way for the duration?

It’s an interesting proposition; possibly even true.  Thompson was certainly “unusual”—and an engaging writer.  Welcome to his potentially unnerving world.

The audiobook, by the way, features Ron McLarty and is available from Recorded Books, LLC.  Curiously, the copy I am listening to, from the local library, becomes generally unplayable about half-way through.  “Coincidence???”

Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (2 of 2)

But—I lose my way in this section.  In the first part of the book, I could barely keep straight the film director, his household, and the expatriate Americans Phil hung around with in Italy.  In the last part, I’m completely lost.  Boyfriends, potential boyfriends, work associates—all these people weaving in and out of focus during parties and other social engagements…I can’t track them all.  Maybe I could, with another reading.  I’ve read this book twice now, and I’ve enjoyed it twice; but something bothers me about it; I can’t quite put my finger on it.

It seems I lose the forest for the trees.  I remember individual trees from the first reading.  I remember, for example, some of the more spectacular events from Phil’s magazine job.  I remember some of Phil’s more spectacular romantic episodes.  Last night, soaking in a hot tub and expecting to read five or ten pages before going to bed, I sailed right on through to the ending, though it was after midnight.  I remembered reading the book the first time—and being confused then; not at the actual ending, but at the events leading up to it, a series of romantic disappointments and blunders.

The book itself ends on a memorable note.  First, like Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty, this story ends with a more or less first-hand account of the Stonewall Riots (“Insurrection?”)  in 1969—the birth of the modern American Gay Rights Movement.  Phil is there, walking through Greenwich Village with a friend—but high on LSD and both of them feeling that they must be hallucinating the police and the riot vans.  The next morning, they realize it was no hallucination.  And out they go, to participate in history.

But in a coda to the main narrative, the book jumps forward over a decade to the disappearance of a man once interested in Phil, the death of another friend due to AIDS—and the general bitter melancholy of those times.  What else has happened to Phil over this decade?  We don’t know.

I understand that Men Who Loved Me is actually the middle book of a trilogy.  By chance it is the book available at my local library.  It would be interesting to read the entire set and see how it compares to Edmund White’s autobiographical novels.  Both Picano and White were members of the Violet Quill gay writing group of the early 1980s.  They’re both well-educated and cultured; they’re about the same age and both grew up in the conservative times when it wasn’t safe to be open about being gay; when you could be imprisoned or committed for it, in fact.

Whatever we think of their writing style or the characters they describe, we still owe them.  They had the courage and persistence to figure out how to write positively about being gay when there were precious few models for that sort of thing.  They forged the path out of necessity.

Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (1 of 2)

This is the large concluding section of Felice Picano’s “Memoir in the Form of a Novel,” Men Who Loved Me.  It describes the life of the narrator “Phil” in the New York of the 1960s, when gays were building their own community in Greenwich Village but weren’t necessarily aware of what they were doing.  In the first large section of the book (“The Most Golden Bulgari”), the narrator described his decision to go to Italy and “become homosexual,” his affair with a Yugoslavian film director in Rome, and his abrupt return to the United States.  A brief interlude links these two main sections of the book.

Returning now to New York, Phil manages to find, within just a few days, both a new job and a new boyfriend, both quite substantial.  The boyfriend lasts for something beyond eight months; the job makes Phil into a highly paid and respected magazine editor.

I continually wonder, reading this section, to what extent Picano is slumming, to what extent he has been pampered.  He’s gotten a good college education, he somehow (though he’s been working as a social worker) got himself off to Italy, he immediately lands a good job almost immediately upon returning to the States.  From whence comes this stunning luck?

At the same time, like the Beat writers, he seems to spend a surprising amount of time socializing and partying.  He takes a fair quantity of drugs (to be fair, I wouldn’t call it “excessive;” if he does it often, and gets considerably “buzzed,” he almost never suffers physically from it; and it those days hallucinogens like LSD were still legal).  And—is he gay?  As before, he begs the question with remarks like “since I seemed destined to become gay”…

In addition to his playwright boyfriend, he assembles a large number of gay Greenwich Village friends.  It’s difficult to tell exactly how “swishy” these acquaintances were; they were not, it appears, queens in anything but behavior.  They don’t seem to have gone in for cross-dressing; they simply went in, some of them, for rather hefty camp.  In these days “before Stonewall,” one definitely watched one’s step amongst the public at large; but these folks were definitely at ease with one another.  The Bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village is well-described; we’re treated to not one but two “lease-break parties” (parties featuring behavior guaranteed to get you thrown out of the apartment you desperately wanted to leave but couldn’t because of the lease provisions).