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by Hunter S. Thompson
From The Silk Road: Fast Boats on The Ocean At Night
We were calling a cab in the Key West airport when I saw
these two Fishhead boys grab my bags off the carousel. The skinny one
was halfway to the parking lot with the big red, white, and blue seabag
full of diving gear before I realized what was happening ...
No, I thought. No, this can't be true. Not right here in
front of my eyes, in the blue-lit glare of the breezeway in this
friendly little airport, with palm trees all around and Mother Ocean
rolling up on the beach just a few hundred yards to the south.
It must be a setup, I thought; some nark in the pay of
the White House that evil bastard Hamilton has been trying to bust me
ever since I set him on fire in Orlando ... and this was, after all,
another election year.
In the good old days I might have thought it was Gordon
Liddy, just running one of his capers. But Gordon doesn't work for the
White House anymore, and Hamilton has other problems -- like trying to
reelect what Dick Goodwin calls “the only truly Republican president
since Herbert Hoover” on the Democratic ticket.
So, for the White House and even the DEA ... and on a
“need to be busted” basis, I figured my name was not even on the list
for 1980. I was not even covering the campaign.
***
I still had the phone in my hand when I saw the fat one.
He came shuffling out of the darkness, where he'd obviously been
standing lookout for his buddy; he glanced around to see that nobody was
watching, then reached down and picked up my triple-locked leather
satchel.
Whoops, I thought, let's have a word with these boys.
They were locals — punks, maybe nineteen or twenty years old, and they
did it so casually that I knew they had been here before. Semipro
luggage thieves, the lowest and cruelest kind of scum. I felt the phone
pulling out of the wall as I suddenly moved toward the action.
Cut the thumbs off these vultures, I thought. Carve on
them.
Then I remembered that my bone knife was in the red,
white, and blue diving bag. All I had for leverage was this baby blue
telephone receiver that I'd just ripped off the wall by the Travelers'
Aid counter. It was trailing about six feet of coiled blue rubber wire
as I ran.
"Goddamn you rotten bastards I'll kill you goddamn
brainless --"
This savage screaming confused me for a moment. Then I
realized it was me. Was I moving faster than my own sounds?
Maybe not. But pure rage is a serious fuel, and now I was
moving at least like Dick Butkus on speed toward this poor doomed
screwhead who had already staggered and fallen to one knee under the
weight of my leather satchel. I was still about 100 feet away when he
heard my screams and saw me coming. I knew I had the angle on him, even
before he staggered ... he was out in the open now and his face was
stupid with terror.
“Eat shit and die!”
It was a thundering brutal scream, and for a moment I
thought it was me again, still moving faster than sound ....
But this time the scream was really behind me. It was
Skinner: He'd been raving, drooling drunk all the way from Aruba,
but the sudden screech of battle had jerked him awake from his stupor
and now he was right behind me, screaming as he ran. I pointed left
toward the parking lot, at the skinny geek with my diving bag. I smelled
the whiskey pumping up from Skinner's lungs as he passed me and angled
left to where I'd pointed.
It was not quite an hour after sunset. We had come in on
the last flight and then lingered for a while in the pilots' lounge, so
now there was nobody else in that end of the airport. A magic moment in
the tropics: just the four of us, like beasts gone into a frenzy, back
to the fang and the claw ... and for just a few seconds the only other
sound in that empty white corridor where we were closing with terrible
speed and craziness on these two Fishhead boys was the high speed
rubbery slap of Skinner's new Topsiders on the tile as we bore down on
them ... wild shouts and the squeal of new rubber ....
***
A punk's nightmare: like getting sucked into the blades
of a jet engine, for no good reason at all ...
Right. Just another late gig at the airport .... Just you
and Bubba, like always; maybe two or three times a week: just hang
around the baggage area until something worth stealing shows up late on
the carousel ... and then, with perfect dumb style and timing, you seize
the bags you've been watching and ...
YE FUCKING GODS! Two drunken screaming brutes, coming
wild out of nowhere and moving with awesome speed ...
“Hey Bubba! What's all that screaming? I thought there
was nobody --”
“O God, no! Run, Bubba, run!"
Killer Drunks! They jumped us like mad dogs. At first I
saw only one of them. He had big brown eyes and no hair ... I was
scared, man. I mean the way he was running and screaming just scared the
shit out of me .... It was CRAZY.
Bubba never had a chance. These were serious Killer
Drunks, man. I mean they were out of their fucking minds. The last thing
I remember is when Bubba started to scream and then all of a sudden I
didn't hear anything ... and that's when the other one hit me. It almost
broke my back, and all I remember after that is pain all over my head
and somebody yelling, ”Eat Shit and Die!“ They were serious, man. They
were trying to kill us. They were crazy!
***
Well ... maybe so. But we were there to cover the Boat
Race, not to act crazy.
And certainly not to kill Fishhead boys ... although
Skinner was so crazed on whiskey that for a while I thought he really
was going to kill that skinny bleeder he ran down out there in the
parking lot.
"You screwhead bastard!" he was yelling. Then I heard the
awful smack of bone against bone .... The sound drove me wild; somewhere
in that madness I recall a flash of remorse, but it had to be very
brief. My last coherent thought before we made physical contact with
these people was, Why are we doing this?
There was not much time to think. All of a sudden the
whole airport came alive with the sounds of violence. A pitiful cry
drifted in from the palm-shrouded darkness of the parking lot as Skinner
made his hit ... and then I crashed into the fat boy at top speed,
leg-whipping him in the groin as we collided and then tumbled wildly
across the tile floor and into the wall of the Avis booth.
I grabbed him by the hair and bit deeply into the flesh
on the side of his neck. The sudden taste of hot blood caused me to bite
him twice again before he went stiff and started making sounds like a
chicken. I got a grip on his hair and dragged him out to the parking
lot, where I heard Skinner still whipping on the other one.
"Let's tie these bastards to a tree and play hurricane,"
I said. He was still kicking the body of the unconscious thief -- but he
heard what I said, and smiled.
So we lashed these two Fishhead boys to a palm tree with
some yellow nylon cord from my diving bag; then we beat them with tree
limbs for twenty or thirty minutes. Finally, when we were too exhausted
to whip on them anymore, I wanted to cut off their thumbs with the bone
knife, but Skinner said it would be wrong.
***
Later, in my penthouse suite at the Pier House, I felt
vaguely unsatisfied.
"We don't need it," Skinner insisted. "The joke's over
when you start mutilating people -- hacking off thumbs and weird shit
like that. We're not in Damascus, Doc. Get a grip on yourself."
I shrugged. Why not? Why push it?
Skinner was drinking heavily now, but his mind seemed
clear. "There could be a few questions when they find those boys
tied up to that tree in the morning," he said.
"Never mind that," I told him. ”We have work to do in the
morning; we have our own questions to ask."
He stared into his drink for a long moment. "Ah yes,” he
said finally, “The Race.”
***
Indeed. We were there to cover the boat race -- big
off-shore boomers like Cigarettes and Scarabs and Panteras, ninety miles
an hour on the open sea. When I asked if I could ride in one of the race
boats, the driver replied, “Sure you can -- but if you have any fillings
in your teeth, you'll probably lose them.”
“What?”
“That’s right,” he said. “We kick ass. We never slow
down.”
"Okay," I said. "I guess I'll ride with you."
The driver looked up at me from his seat in the cockpit
of the boat. It was forty feet long and the whole rear end was two
300-horsepower Chrysler engines. "No you won't," he said after waiting a
moment while Skinner took some pictures of his boat. "It's against the
rules."
Skinner spit down into the cockpit. "Fuck you, man," he
said. "We're riding on this boat. We're taking it to Cuba."
The driver seized a wrench handle and quickly stood up in
the cockpit. "You conch bastard!" he snarled. "You spit on my boat!"
Skinner was wearing three Nikons around his neck, and I
grabbed him by one of the straps. "Are you sick?" I said quietly. "Is
this how you act when I finally get you a decent assignment?"
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