Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (6 page)

This had been a problem all along. We had tried to mobilize a huge underground vote, without frightening the burghers into a counterattack. But it didn’t work—primarily because most of our best people were also hairy, and very obvious. Our opening shot—the midnight registration campaign—had been ramrodded by bearded heads; Mike Solheim and Pierre Landry, who worked the streets and bars for head voters like wild junkies, in the face of near-total apathy.

Aspen is full of freaks, heads, fun-hogs, and weird night-people of every description ... but most of them would prefer jail or the bastinado to the horror of actually registering to vote. Unlike the main bulk of burghers and businessmen, the dropout has to
make an effort
to use his long-dormant vote. There is not much to it, no risk and no more than ten
minutes of small talk and time—but to the average dropout the idea of registering to vote is a very heavy thing. The psychic implications, “copping back into the system,” etc., are fierce ... and we learned, in Aspen, that there is no point even trying to convince people to take that step unless you can give them a very good reason. Like a very unusual candidate ... or a fireball pitch of some kind.

The central problem that we grappled with last fall is the gap that separates the Head Culture from activist politics. Somewhere in the nightmare of failure that gripped America between 1965 and 1970, the old Berkeley-born notion of beating The System by fighting it gave way to a sort of numb conviction that it made more sense in the long run to Flee, or even to simply hide, than to fight the bastards on anything even vaguely resembling their own terms.

Our ten-day registration campaign had focused almost entirely on the Head/Dropout Culture: they wanted no part of activist politics, and it had been a hellish effort to convince them to register at all. Many had lived in Aspen for five or six years, and they weren’t at all concerned with being
convicted
of vote fraud—they simply didn’t want to be hassled. Most of us are living here because we like the idea of being able to walk out our front doors and smile at what we see. On my own front porch I have a palm tree growing in a blue toilet bowl ... and on occasion I like to wander outside, stark naked, and fire my .44 Magnum at various gongs I’ve mounted on the nearby hillside. I like to load up on mescaline and turn my amplifier up to 110 decibels for a taste of “White Rabbit” while the sun comes up on the snow-peaks along the Continental Divide.

Which is not entirely the point. The world is full of places where a man can run wild on drugs and loud music and firepower—but not for long. I lived a block above Haight Street for two years, but by the end of ’66 the whole neighborhood had become a cop-magnet and a bad sideshow. Between the narcs and the psychedelic hustlers, there was not much room to live.

The idea of asking young heads to “go clean” never occurred to us. They could go dirty, or even naked, for all we cared ... all we asked them to do was first
register
and then
vote
. A year earlier these same people had seen no difference between Nixon and Humphrey. They were against the war in Vietnam, but the McCarthy crusade had never reached them. At
the grass-roots of the Dropout Culture, the idea of going Clean for Gene was a bad joke. Both Dick Gregory and George Wallace drew unnaturally large chunks of the vote in Aspen. Robert Kennedy would probably have carried the town, if he hadn’t been killed, but he wouldn’t have won by much. The town is essentially Republican: GOP registrations outnumber Democrats by more than two to one ... but the combined total of both major parties just about equals the number of registered Independents, most of whom pride themselves on being totally unpredictable. They are a jangled mix of Left/Crazies and Birchers: cheap bigots, dope dealers, Nazi ski instructors, and spaced-out “psychedelic farmers” with no politics at all beyond self-preservation.

At the end of that frenzied ten-day hustle (since we kept no count, no lists or records) we had no way of knowing how many half-stirred dropouts had actually registered, or how many of those would vote. So it was a bit of a shock all around when, toward the end of that Election Day, our poll watchers’ tallies showed that Joe Edwards had already cashed more than 300 of the 486
new
registrations that had just gone into the books.

The race was going to be very close. The voting lists showed roughly one hundred pro-Edwards voters who hadn’t showed up at the polls, and we figured that one hundred phone calls might raise at least twenty-five of these laggards. At that point it looked like twenty-five might make the nut, particularly in a sharply divided three-way mayor’s race in a town with only 1,623 registered voters.

So we needed those phones. But where? Nobody knew ... until a girl who’d been working on the phone network suddenly came up with a key to a spacious two-room office in the old Elks Club building. She had once worked there, for a local businessman and ex-hipster named Craig, who had gone to Chicago on business.

We seized Craig’s office at once, ignoring the howls and curses of the mob in the Elks bar—where the outgoing mayor’s troops were already gathering to celebrate the victory of his handpicked successor. (Legally, there was nothing they could do to keep us out of the place, although later that night they voted to have Craig evicted ... and he is now running for the state legislature on a Crush the Elks platform.) By six o’clock we had the new headquarters working nicely. The phone calls
were extremely brief and direct: “Get off your ass, you bastard! We
need
you! Get out and vote!”

About six people worked the lists and the phones. Others went off to hustle the various shacks, lodges, hovels, and communes where we knew there were voters but no phones. The place filled up rapidly, as the word went out that we finally had a headquarters. Soon the whole second floor of the Elks Club was full of bearded freaks yelling frantically at each other; strange-looking people rushing up and down the stairs with lists, notebooks, radios, and cases of Budweiser . . .

Somebody stuck a purple spansule in my hand, saying, “Goddamn, you look tired! What you need is a hit of this excellent mescaline.” I nodded absently and stuck the thing in one of the twenty-two pockets in my red campaign parka. Save this drug for later, I thought. No point getting crazy until the polls close ... keep checking these stinking lists, squeeze every last vote out of them ... keep calling, pushing, shouting at the bastards, threaten them . . .

There was something weird in the room, some kind of electric madness that I’d never noticed before. I stood against a wall with a beer in my hand and watched the machinery working. And after a while I realized what the difference was. For the first time in the campaign, these people really believed we were going to win—or at least that we had a good chance. And now, with less than an hour to go, they were working like a gang of coal miners sent down to rescue the survivors of a cave-in. At that point—with my own role ended—I was probably the most pessimistic person in the room: the others seemed entirely convinced that Joe Edwards would be the next mayor of Aspen ... that our wild-eyed experiment with Freak Power was about to carry the day and establish a nationwide precendent.

We were in for a very long night—waiting for the ballots to be counted by hand—but even before the polls closed we knew we had changed the whole structure of Aspen’s politics. The Old Guard was doomed, the liberals were terrorized, and the Underground had emerged, with terrible suddenness, on a very serious power trip. Throughout the campaign I’d been promising, on the streets and in the bars, that if Edwards won this mayor’s race I would run for sheriff next year (November 1970) ... but it
never occurred to me that I would actually have to run; no more than I’d ever seriously believed we could mount a “takeover bid” in Aspen.

But now it was happening. Even Edwards, a skeptic from the start, had said on election eve that he thought we were going to “win big.” When he said it, we were in his office, sorting out xerox copies of the Colorado election laws for our poll-watching teams, and I recall being stunned at his optimism.

“Never in hell,” I said. “If we win at all it’s going to be damn close—like twenty-five votes.” But his comment had jangled me badly. Goddamn! I thought. Maybe we
will
win . . . and what then?

Finally, at around six thirty, I felt so useless and self-conscious just hanging around the action that I said what the hell, and left. I felt like Dagwood Bumstead pacing back and forth in some comic-strip version of a maternity-ward waiting room. Fuck this, I thought. I’d been awake and moving around like a cannonball for the last fifty hours, and now—with nothing else to confront—I felt the adrenaline sinking. Go home, I thought, eat this mescaline and put on the earphones, get away from this public agony . . .

At the bottom of the long wooden stairway from Craig’s office to the street I paused for a quick look into the Elks Club bar. It was crowded and loud and happy ... a bar full of winners, like always. They had never backed a loser. They were the backbone of Aspen: shop owners, cowboys, firemen, cops, construction workers ... and their leader was the most popular mayor in the town’s history, a two-term winner now backing his own handpicked successor, a half-bright young lawyer. I flashed the Elks a big smile and a quick V-fingered “victory” sign. Nobody smiled ... but it was hard to know if they realized that their man was already croaked; in a sudden three-way race he had bombed early, when the local Contractors’ Association and all their real estate allies had made the painful decision to abandon Oates, their natural gut-choice, and devote all their weight and leverage to stopping the “hippie candidate,” Joe Edwards. By the weekend before Election Day, it was no longer a three-way campaign ... and by Monday the only question left was how many mean-spirited, Right-bent shitheads could be mustered to vote
against
Joe Edwards.

Our program, basically, was to drive the real estate goons completely out of the valley: to prevent the State Highway Department from bringing a four-lane highway into the town and, in fact,
to ban all auto traffic from every downtown street
. Turn them all into grassy malls where everybody, even freaks, could do whatever’s right. The cops would become trash collectors and maintenance men for a fleet of municipal bicycles, for anybody to use. No more huge, space-killing apartment buildings to block the view, from any downtown street, of anybody who might want to look up and see the mountains. No more land rapes, no more busts for “flute-playing” or “blocking the sidewalk” ... fuck the tourists, dead-end the highway, zone the greedheads out of existence, and in general create a town where people could live like human beings, instead of slaves to some bogus sense of Progress that is driving us all mad.