flee this hotel

I am feeling a little desperate about getting out of this hotel.  Eight days in the Sheraton-Schroeder is like three months in the Cook County jail.  The place is run by old Germans.  ------------------ [Hunter Thompson excerpt, campaign trail '72] ----------------- The whole staff is German.  Most of them speak enough English to make themselves understood in a garbled, menacing sort of way . . . and they are especially full of hate this week because the hotel has just been sold and the whole staff seems to think they'll be fired just as soon as the election crowd leaves.

So they are doing everything possible to make sure that nobody unfortunate enough to be trapped here this week will ever forget the experience.  The room radiators are uncontrollable, the tubs won't drain, the elevators go haywire every night, the phones ring for no reason at all hours of the night, the coffee shop is almost never open, and about three days before the election the bar ran out of beer.

 The manager explained that they were "runnig oud ze inventory" -- selling off everything in stock, including all the booze and almost every item on the menu except things like cabbage and sauerbrauten.  The first wave of complaints were turned aside with a hiss and a chop of the hand, but after two days and nights of this Prussian madness the manager was apparently caused to know pressure from forces beyond his control....

But the root ambience of the place never changed.  Dick Tuck, the legendary Kennedy advance man now working for McGovern, has stayed here several times in the past and calls it "the worst hotel in the world."

Ah yes . . . I can hear the Mojo Wire humming frantically across the room.  Crouse is stuffing page after page of gibberish into it.  Greg Jackson, the ABC correspondent, had been handling it most of the day and whipping us along like Bear Bryant, but he had to catch a plane for New York and now we are left on our own.

The pressure is building up.  The copy no longer makes sense.  Huge chunks are either missing or too scrambled to follow from one sentence to another.  Crouse just fed two consecutive pages into the machine upside-down, provoking a burst of angry yelling from whoever is operating the receiver out there on the Coast.

And now the bastard is beeping . . . beeping . . . beeping, which means it is hungry for this final page, which means I no longer have time to crank out any real wisdom on the meaning of the Wisconsin primary.  But that can wait, I think.  We have a three-week rest now before the next one of these goddamn nightmares . . . which gives me a bit of time to think about what happened here.  Meanwhile, the only thing we can be absolutely sure of is that George McGovern is no longer the hopelessly decent loser that he has looked like up to now.

The real surprise of this campaign, according to Theodore White on CBS-TV last night, is that "George McGovern has turned out to be one of the great field organizers of American politics."

But Crouse is dealing with that story, and the wire is beeping again.  So this page will have to go, for good or ill . . . and the minute it finishes we will flee this hotel like rats from a burning ship.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I've been alone
all the years
so many ways to count the tears
I never change
I never will
I'm so afraid -- the way I feel

Days -- when the rain and the sun are gone
black as night
agony's torn at my heart too long
so afraid
slip and fall and I die

I've been alone
always down
no one cared to stay around
I never change
I never will
I'm so afraid
the way I feel

Days when the rain and the sun are gone
black as night
agony's torn at my heart too long
so afraid
slip and fall and I die
===================
{book excerpt -- Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72.  Hunter Thompson.  Copyright 1973}
{song:  "I'm So Afraid" -- written by Lindsey Buckingham.  Fleetwood Mac, 1975, Reprise.}

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