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Pentagon.
”

    “Hot damn!” two of them screamed at once. “A black jeep, you say?”
    They roared off, and so did we. Bouncing across the rocks & scrub oak/cactus like iron tumbleweeds. The beer in my hand flew up and hit the top, then fell in my lap and soaked my crotch with warm foam.
    “You’re fired,” I said to the driver. “Take me back to the pits.”
    It was time, I felt, to get grounded—to ponder this rotten assignment and figure out how to cope with it. Lacerda insisted on Total Coverage. He wanted to go back out in the dust storm and keep trying for some rare combination of film and lens that might penetrate the awful stuff.
    “Joe,” our driver, was willing. His name was not really “Joe,” but that’s what we’d been instructed to call him. I had talked to the FoMoCo boss the night before, and when he mentioned the driver he was assigning to us he said, “His real name is Steve, but you should call him Joe.”
    “Why not?” I said. “We’ll call him anything he wants. How about ‘Zoom’?”
    “No dice,” said the Ford man. “It has to be ‘Joe.’”
    Lacerda agreed, and sometime around noon he went out on the desert, again, in the company of our driver, Joe. I went back to the blockhouse bar/casino that was actually the Mint Gun Club—where I began to drink heavily, think heavily, and make many heavy notes. . . .

6.
A Night on the Town . . . Confrontation at the Desert Inn . . . Drug Frenzy at the Circus-Circus

    Saturday midnight . . . Memories of this night are extremely hazy. All I have, for guide-pegs, is a pocketful of keno cards and cocktail napkins, all covered with scribbled notes. Here is one: “Get the Ford man, demand a Bronco for race-observation purposes . . . photos? . . . Lacerda/call . . . why not a helicopter? . . . Get on the phone,
lean
on the fuckers . . . heavy yelling.”
    Another says: “Sign on Paradise Boulevard—‘Stopless and Topless’ . . . bush-league sex compared to L.A.;
pasties
here—total naked public humping in L. A. . . . Las Vegas is a society of armed masturbators/gambling is the kicker here/sex is extra/weird trip for high rollers . . . house-whores for winners, hand jobs for the bad luck crowd.”
    A long time ago when I lived in Big Sur down the road from Lionel Olay I had a friend who liked to go to Reno for the crap-shooting. He owned a sporting-goods store in Carmel. And one month he drove his Mercedes highway-cruiser to Reno on three consecutive weekends—winning heavily each time. After three trips he was something like $15,000 ahead, so he decided to skip the fourth weekend and take some friends to dinner at Nepenthe. “Always quit winners,” he explained. “And besides, it’s a long drive.”
    On Monday morning he got a phone call from Reno—from the general manager of the casino he’d been working out on. “We missed you this weekend,” said the GM. “The pit-men were bored.”
    “Shucks,” said my friend.
    So the next weekend he flew up to Reno in a private plane, with a friend and two girls—all “special guests” of the GM. Nothing too good for high rollers. . . .
    And on Monday morning the same plane—the casino’s plane—flew him back to the Monterey airport. The pilot lent him a dime to call a friend for a ride to Carmel. He was $30,000 in debt, and two months later he was looking down the barrel of one of the world’s heaviest collection agencies.
    So he sold his store, but that didn’t make the nut. They could wait for the rest, he said—but then he got stomped, which convinced him that maybe he’d be better off borrowing enough money to pay the whole wad.
    Mainline gambling is a very heavy business—and Las Vegas makes Reno seem like your friendly neighborhood grocery store. For a loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth. Until about a year ago, there was a giant billboard on the outskirts of Las Vegas, saying:
    D ON’T G AMBLE W ITH M ARIJUANA !
I N N EVADA : P OSSESSION —20 Y EARS
S ALE —L