Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone Read Online Free PDF

I called the district attorney and tried to have the mayor arrested at once ... but the DA said “Leave me out of it: police your own elections.”
    Which we did, with finely organized teams of poll watchers: two inside each polling place at all times, with six more just outside in vans or trucks full of beef, coffee, propaganda, checklists and bound xerox copies of all Colorado voting laws.
    The idea was to keep massive assistance available, at all times, to our point men
inside
the official voting places. And the reasoning behind this rather heavy public act—which jolted a lot of people who wouldn’t have voted for Edwards anyway—was our concern that the mayor and his cops would create some kind of ugly scene, early on, and rattle the underground grapevine with fear-rumors that would scare off a lot of our voters. Most of our people were fearful of
any
kind of legal hassle at the polls, regardless of their rights. So it seemed important that we should make it very clear, from the start, that we knew the laws and we weren’t going to tolerate
any
harassment of our people. None.
    Each poll watcher on the dawn shift was given a portable tape recorder with a microphone that he was instructed to stick in the face of any opposition poll watcher who asked anything beyond the legally allowable questions regarding Name, Age, and Residence. Nothing else could be asked, under penalty of an obscure election law relating to “frivolous challenge,” a little brother to the far more serious charge of “voter intimidation.”
    And since the only person who had actually threatened to intimidate voters was the mayor, we decided to force the confrontation as soon as possible in Ward 1, where Buggsy had announced that he would personally stand the first poll-watching shift for the opposition. If the buggers wanted a confrontation, we decided to give it to them.
    The polling place in Ward 1 was a lodge called the Cresthaus, owned by an old and infamous Swiss/Nazi who calls himself Guido Meyer. Martin Bormann went to Brazil, but Guido came to Aspen—arriving here several years after the Great War ... and ever since then he has spent most of his energy (including two complete terms as city magistrate) getting even with this country by milking the tourists and having young (or poor) people arrested.
    So Guido was watching eagerly when the mayor arrived in his parking lot at ten minutes to seven, creeping his Porsche through a gauntlet of silent Edwards people. We had mustered a half dozen of the scurviest looking
legal
voters we could find—and when the mayor arrived at the polls, these freaks were waiting to vote. Behind them, lounging around a coffee dispenser in an old VW van, were at least a dozen others, most of them large and bearded, and several so eager for violence that they had spent the whole night making chain-whips and loading up on speed to stay crazy.
    Buggsy looked horrified. It was the first time in his long drug experience that he had ever laid eyes on a group of non-passive, super-aggressive Heads. What had got into them? Why were their eyes so wild? And why were they yelling: “You’re fucked, Buggsy ... We’re going to croak you ... Your whole act is doomed ... We’re going to beat your ass like a gong.”
    Who were they? All strangers? Some gang of ugly bikers or speed freaks from San Francisco? Yes . . . of course . . . that bastard Edwards had brought in a bunch of ringers. But then he looked again ... and recognized, at the head of the group, his ex-drinkalong bar-buddy Brad Reed, the potter and known gun freak, 6’ 4” and 220, grinning down through his beard and black hair-flag ... saying nothing, just smiling . . .
    Great God, he knew the others, too ... there was Don Davidson, the accountant, smooth shaven and quite normal-looking in a sleek maroon ski parka, but not smiling at all ... and who were those girls, those ripe blond bodies whose names he knew from chance meetings in friendlier times? What