8. Back Door Beauty ...& Finally a Bit of Serious Drag Racing on the Strip

Sometime around midnight my attorney wanted coffee. He bad been vomiting fairly regularly as we drove around the Strip, and the right flank of the Whale was badly streaked. We were idling at a stoplight in front of the Silver Slipper beside a big blue Ford with Oklahoma plates ...two hoggish-looking couples in the car, probably cops from Muskogee using the Drug Conference to give their wives a look at Vegas. They looked like they’d just beaten Caesar’s Palace for about $38 at the blackjack tables, and now they were headed for the Circus-Circus to whoop it up ....

but suddenly, they found themselves next to a white Cadillac convertible all covered with vomit and a 300-pound Samoan in a yellow fishnet T-shirt yelling at them: “Hey there! You folks want to buy some heroin?”

No reply. No sign of recognition. They’d been warned about this kind of crap: Just ignore it ...

“Hey, honkies!” my attorney screamed. “Goddamnit, I’m serious! I want to sell you some pure fuckin’ smack!” He was hanging out of the car, very close to them. But still nobody an swered. I glanced over, very briefly, and saw four middle Americanan faces frozen with shock, staring straight ahead.

We were in the middle lane. A quick left turn would be ille would have to go straight ahead when the light en escape at the next corner. I waited, tapping the accelerator nervously ...

My attorney was losing control: “Cheap heroin!” he was shouting. “This is the real stuff You won’t get hooked! God damnit, I know what I have here!” He whacked on the side of the car, as if to get their attention.., but they wanted no part of us.

“You folks never talked to a vet before?” said my attorney. “I just got back from Veet Naam. This is scag, folks! Pure scag!”

Suddenly the light changed and the Ford bolted off like a rocket. I stomped on the accelerator and stayed right next to them for about two hundred yards, watching for cops in the mirror while my attorney kept screaming at them:

“Shoot! Fuck! Scag! Blood! Heroin! Rape! Cheap! Communist! Jab it right into your fucking eyeballs!”

We were approaching the Circus-Circus at high speed and the Oklahoma car was veering left, trying to muscle into the turn lane. I stomped the Whale into passing gear and we ran fender to fender for a moment. He wasn’t up to hitting me; there was horror in his eyes.

The man in the back seat lost control of himself ... lunging across his wife and snarling wildly: “You dirty bastards! Pull over and I’ll kill you! God damn you! You bas tards!” He seemed ready to leap out the window and into our car, crazy with rage. Luckily the Ford was a two-door. He couldn’t get out.

We were coming up to the next stoplight and the Ford was still trying to move left. We were both running full bore. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that we’d left the other traffic far behind; there was a big opening to the right. So I mashed on the brake, hurling my attorney against the dash board, and in the instant the Ford surged ahead I cut across his tail and zoomed into a side-street. A sharp right turn across three lanes of traffic. But it worked. We left the Ford stalled in the middle of the intersection, hung in the middle of a screeching left turn. With a little luck, he’d be arrested for reckless driving.

My attorney was laughing as we careened in low gear, with the light sout, through a dusty tangle of backstreets behind the Desert Inn. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Those Okies were getting excited. That guy in the back seat was trying to bite me! Shit, he was frothing at the mouth.” He nodded solemnly. “I should have maced the fucker ... a criminal psychotic, total breakdown ... you never know when they’re likely to explode.”

I swung the Whale into a turn that seemed to lead out of the maze—but instead of skidding, the bastard almost rolled.

“Holy shit!” my attorney screamed. “Turn on the fucking lights!” He was clinging to the top of the windshield ... and suddenly he was doing the Big Spit again, leaning over the side.

I refused to slow down until I was sure nobody was following us—especially that Oklahoma Ford: those people were definitely dangerous, at least until they calmed down. Would they report that terrible quick encounter to the police? Probably not. It had happened too fast, with no witnesses, and the I were pretty good that nobody would believe them anyway. The idea that two heroin pushers in a white Cadillac convertible would be dragging up and down the Strip, abusing total strangers at stoplights, was prima facie absurd. Not even Sonny Liston ever got that far out of control.

We made another turn and almost rolled again. The Coupe de Ville is not your ideal machine for high speed cornering in residential neighborhoods. The handling is very mushy ...

unlike the Red Shark, which had responded very nicely to situations requiring the quick four-wheel drift. But the Whale Bad of cutting loose at the critical moment—had a tendency to dig in, which accounted for that sickening “here we go’ sensation.

At first I thought it was only because the tires were soft, so I took it into the Texaco station next to the Flamingo and had the tires pumped up to fifty pounds each—which alarmed the attendant, until I explained that these were “experimental” tires.

But fifty pounds each didn’t help the cornering, so I swent back a few hours later and told him I wanted to try seventy five. He shook his head nervously. “Not me,” he said, handing me the air hgose. “Here. They’re your tires. You do it.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “You think they can’t take seventy-five?”

He nodded, moving away as I stooped to deal with the left front. “You’re damn right,” he said. “Those tires want twenty eight in the front and thirty two in the rear. Hell, fifty’s dangerous, but seventy five is crazy. They’ll explode!”

I shook my head and kept filling the left front. “I told you,” I said, “Sandoz laboratories designed these tires. They’re special. I could load them up to a hundred.

“God almighty!” he groaned. “Don’t do that here.”

“Not today,” I replied. “I want to see how they corner with seventy-five.”

He chuckled. “You won’t even get to the corner, Mister.”

“We’ll see,” I said, moving around to the rear with the air-hose. In truth, I was nervous. The two front ones were tighter than snare drums; they felt like teak wood when I tapped on them with the rod. But what the hell? I thought. If they ex plode, so what? It’s not often that a man gets a chance to run terminal experiments on a virgin Cadillac and four brand-new $80 tires. For all I knew, the thing might start cornering like a Lotus Elan. If not, all I had to do was call the VIP agency and have another one delivered ... maybe threaten them with a lawsuit because all four tires had exploded on me, while driving in heavy traffic. Demand an Eldorado, next time, with four Michelin Xs. And put it all on the card ...charge it to the St Louis Browns.

As it turned out, the Whale behaved very nicely with the altered tire pressures. The ride was a trifle rough; I could feel every pebble on the highway, like being on roller skates in a gravel pit... but the thing began cornering in a very stylish manner, very much like driving a motorcycle at top speed in a hard rain: one slip and ZANG, over the high side, cartwheel ing across the landscape with your head in your hands.

About thirty minutes after our brush with the Okies we pulled into an all-night diner on the Tonopah highway, on the kirts of a mean/scag ghetto called “North Las Vegas.” Which is actually outside the city limits of Vegas proper. North Vegas is where you go when you’ve fucked up once too often on the Strip, and when you’re not even welcome in the cut-rate downtown places around Casino Center.