Fear and Loathing at the Bauerstown Baseball Association

Sports writer and legendary freak Hunter S. Thompson covers my little league baseball game, 1979

By the time we got to the little league field, my attorney had begun raving about the concession stand. “As your attorney,” he said, “I advise you to buy some hot dogs and Swedish fish.” The mescaline now clearly had a grip on him. At the sound of a foul ball, he swung around to the right, nearly elbowing a plump-faced housewife with a purple sailboat knitted pattern on her sweater.

“These people are vultures,” my attorney said, wheeling back to face me. “They’re filth. They probably eat babies.” A bead of spittle stuck to his bottom lip. The lady with the sailboat sweater took a step back. Her eyes had become wild with fear. With a head swimming with mescaline, her head looked like a slab of bread dough stuck atop a headless body.

Standing between a 300 pound mescaline-crazed Samoan and this terrified woman, who for all I knew was the wife of the police commissioner, I felt the need to explain the importance of our task. To put her terrified, doughy mind at ease.

“Ma’am,” I said. “I am a doctor of Journalism and this is my attorney. We were sent here on a secret mission from San Francisco. Something of importance is going to happen here, according to my editor, Charlie Chan. Do you understand?”

She took another step backwards, nervously biting her bottom lip. I was now visualizing her husband—no doubt a squared jawed ex-Marine as well as a cop—clotting my head with a nightstick. This was getting dangerous. She needed to be neutralized.

“There are infiltrators here. In the bleachers, umpiring the games. CIA. KGB. IBM. We’re here to protect you—”

She stumbled backward and ran away—no doubt to gather a posse of insurance adjusters to bash the skulls of the acid-chomping degenerates hanging around the little league concessionaire.

“Suppose we get our hot dog and repair to greener pastures?” I said to my attorney. He was transfixed by a game winning hit by one of the players for the Allegheny All-Stars.

“Did you see that?” he said. “I’d swear that little kid over there just closed his eyes and stuck his bat out, knocking the ball all the way to the center field fence. Now the other kids are literally hoisting him on their shoulders.”

“And I’d swear your face is being eaten by rabid wolverines.”

“Son of a bitch that kid got lucky.”

"That happens sometimes. Let's get some hot dogs. And Swedish Fish. They're two cents a piece here. We can charge 10,000 of them to Sports Illustrated."

"Last out in the game, down by one, full count and a man on first and third, and the kid just stuck his goddamn bat out there. Won the game."

"Amazing. Now let's go before the vultures peck out our eyes. Got any amyls left?"

"Luckiest damn kid in the whole world," my attorney said over the sounds of frenzied, victorious little leaguers.

Zen batter and sports hero.

Surviving in the 1970s

In a review of the 70s concentration camp movie Seven Beauties, psychologist and concentration camp survivor Bruno Bettelheim wrote in 1976 that the decade was guided by a sense of "empty survivorship," a desire to simply exist from moment-to-moment despite the lack of any true threat.

In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter Thompson's 1971 tale of drug excess, makes the comparision to the 60s counterculture explicit:

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force – is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

It makes sense that the culture of the 70s was tuned to mere survival. If Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas accomplished nothing else, it revealed the very moment in which the 60s counterculture became as empty and ugly as the plastic/corporate culture it was meant to replace.

By the mid-70s, youth culture was stuck between two ideals of corruption. The result? A decade obsessed with themes of wandering and surviving.

Since I encountered this notion of "empty survivorship" in Griel Marcus' Lipstick Traces, it has become the key to explaining the entire decade—a time marked by:

Peak popularity of daredevils who conquer entirely invented dangers

• Evel Kneival
• the nut who decided to walk a tightrope across the World Trade Center)

Songs about aimless wandering

• Running on Empty
• Truckin'

... or the million songs about truckers trying to make it home

• Six Days on the Road
• Willin'

70s Disaster films

• The Towering Inferno
• Airport (not to be confused with the great Airplane!)

... and horror films

• Texas Chainsaw Massacre
• Halloween

Songs about being lost in space

• Major Tom
• Rocket Man (both of which use space as a metaphor for drug addiction)

Or songs literally about survival

• I Will Survive

Making it through, finding your way home, just surviving—themes of a decade afraid to go forward but not wanting to go back.