Fear of Going in Las Vegas

(an affectionate work of parody)

My expansive collection of Hunter S. Thompson literature.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the laxatives began to take hold.  I remember saying something like, "I feel a bit like I'm going to shit my pants, maybe you should drive..."  And suddenly there was terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge toilets, all flushing and splashing around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.  And a voice was screaming, "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn things?"

The it was quiet again.  My attorney had taken off his shirt and was pouring castor oil on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process.  "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses.  "Never mind," I said.  "It's your turn to drive."  I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway.  No point mentioning those toilets, I thought.  The poor bastard will see them soon enough.

It was almost noon, and we still had more than a hundred miles to go.  They would be tough miles.  Very soon, I knew our intestines would be completely twisted.  But there was no going back and there was no time to shit or get off the pot, as they say.  We would have to ride it out.  Press registration for the fabulous Mint 400 was already underway, and we had to get there by four to claim our two-bathroom suite.  A fashionable sporting magazine in New York had taken care of the reservations, along with this huge red Chevy convertible we'd just rented off the Sunset Strip... and I was, after all, a professional journalist; so I had an obligation to cover the story, for good or ill.

The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs.  The trunk of the car looked like a mobile hospital purgatives lab.  We had two colostomy bags, 75 tablets of Exlax, 2-ply sheets of Cottonelle, a salt shaker half full of cholestramine, a whole galaxy of multicolored purgatives, aperients, laxatives, insoluble fiber, also a quart of paregoric, a quart of castor oil, a case of Correctal, a pint of raw prune juice and two dozen enemas.

All this had been rounded up the night before in a frenzy of high-speed driving all over Las Angeles County - from Topanga to Watts, we picked up everything we could get our hands on.  Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious purgatives collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

The only thing that really worried me was the prune juice.  There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of a prune juice binge.