“Fear and Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird: The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat” – Oscar Zeta Ascota by Hunter S. Thompson, Rolling Stone, 1977. The basis for the movie Where the Buffalo Roam.
Requiem for a Crazed Heavyweight . . . An Unfinished Memoir on the Life and Doom of Oscar Zeta Acosta, First & Last of the Savage Brown Buffalos.
He Crawled with Lepers and Lawyers, but He Was Tall on His Own Hind Legs When He Walked at Night with the King.
Nobody knows the weirdness I’ve seen … On the trail of the brown buffalo.
Old Black Joe
I walk in the night rain until the dawn of the new day. 1 have devised the plan, straightened out the philosophy and set up the organization. When I have the 1 million Brown Buffalos on my side I will present the demands for a new nation to both the U.S. Government and the United Nations. . . and then I’ll split and write the book. I have no desire to be a politician. I don’t want to lead anyone. I have no practical ego. I am not ambitious. I merely want to do what is right.
Once in every century there comes a man who is chosen to speak for his people. Moses, Mao and Martin [Luther King Jr.] are examples. Who’s to say that I am not such a man? In this day and age the man for all seasons needs many voices. Perhaps that is why the gods have sent me into Riverbank, Panama, San Francisco, Alpine and Juarez. Perhaps that is why I’ve been taught so many trades. Who will deny that I am unique. — Oscar Acosta
Oscar Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo
Well… not me, Old Sport. Wherever you are and in whatever shape – dead or alive or even both, eh? That’s one thing they can’t take away from you… Which is lucky, I think, for the rest of us: Because (and, yeah – let’s face it, Oscar) you were not real light on your feet in this world, and you were too goddamn heavy for most of the boats you jumped into. One of the great regrets of my life is that I was never able to introduce you to my old football buddy, Richard Nixon. The main thing he feared in this life – even worse than Queers and Jews and Mutants – was people who might run amok; he called them “loose cannons on the deck,” and he wanted them all put to sleep.
That’s one graveyard we never even checked, Oscar, but why not? If your classic “doomed nigg*r” style of paranoia had any validity at all, you must understand that it was not just Richard Nixon who was out to get you – but all the people who thought like Nixon and all the judges and U.S. attorneys he appointed in those weird years. Were there any of Nixon’s friends among all those Superior Court judges you subpoenaed and mocked and humiliated when you were trying to bust the grand jury selection system in L.A.? How many of those Brown Beret “bodyguards” you called “brothers” were deep-cover cops or informants? I recall being seriously worried about that when we were working on that story about the killing of Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar by an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy. How many of those bomb-throwing, trigger-happy freaks who slept on mattresses in your apartment were talking to the sheriff on a chili-hall pay phone every morning? Or maybe to the judges who kept jailing you for contempt of court, when they didn’t have anything else?
Yeah, and so much for the “Paranoid Sixties.” It’s time to end this bent seance – or almost closing time, anyway – but before we get back to raw facts and rude lawyer’s humor, I want to make sure that at least one record will show that I tried and totally failed, for at least five years, to convince my allegedly erstwhile Samoan attorney, Oscar Zeta Acosta, that there was no such thing as paranoia: At least not in that cultural and political war zone called “East L.A.” in the late 1960s and especially not for an aggressively radical “Chicano Lawyer” who thought he could stay up all night, every night, eating acid and throwing “Molotov co*cktails” with the same people he was going to have to represent in a downtown courtroom the next morning.
There were times – all too often, I felt – when Oscar would show up in front of the courthouse at nine in the morning with a stench of fresh gasoline on his hands and a green crust of charred soap-flakes on the toes of his $300 snakeskin cowboy boots. He would pause outside the courtroom just long enough to give the TV press five minutes of crazed rhetoric for the Evening News, then he would shepherd his equally crazed “clients” into the courtroom for their daily war-circus with the Judge. When you get into bear baiting on that level, paranoia is just another word for ignorance… They really are out to get you.
The odds on his being dragged off to jail for “contempt” were about fifty-fifty on any given day – which meant he was always in danger of being seized and booked with a pocket full of “bennies” or “black beauties” at the property desk. After several narrow escapes he decided that it was necessary to work in the Courtroom as part of a three-man “defense team.”
One of his “associates” was usually a well-dressed, well-mannered young Chicano whose only job was to carry at least 100 milligrams of pure speed at all times and feed Oscar whenever he signaled; the other was not so well-dressed or mannered; his job was to stay alert and be one step ahead of the bailiffs when they made a move on Oscar – at which point he would reach out and grab any pills, powders, shivs or other evidence he was handed, then sprint like a human bazooka for the nearest exit.
This strategy worked so well for almost two years that Oscar and his people finally got careless. They had survived another long day in court – on felony arson charges, this time, for trying to burn down the Biltmore Hotel during a speech by then Governor Ronald Reagan – and they were driving back home to Oscar’s headquarters pad in the barrio (and maybe running sixty or sixty-five in a fifty m.p.h. speed zone, Oscar later admitted) when they were suddenly jammed to a stop by two LAPD cruisers. “They acted like we’d just robbed a bank,” said Frank, looking right down the barrel of a shotgun. “They made us all lie face down on the street and then they searched the car, and –”
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Come check out these great titles by Hunter S. Thompson at Amazon.com.
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Hunter S.Thompson was an American journalist and author, and the founder of the gonzo journalism movement. Born and raised in Louisville, Ky, his books include Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, among others.
See Thompson’s Author Page at Goodreads.com.
Come check out this informative piece by Jeffrey Somers, Biography of Hunter S. Thompson, Writer, Creator of Gonzo Journalism. Jeffery Somers is an award-winning author with nine novels and over 40 short stories. Somers is a frequent contributor to Thought.co, a premier reference site with a focus on expert-created education content.
Check out this non-fiction title by Somers: Writing Without Rules: How to Write & Sell a Novel Without Guidelines, Experts, or (Occasionally) Pants, available at Amazon.com.
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