Terry Gilliam
Paura e delirio a Las Vegas

HE WHO MAKES A BEAST OF HIMSELF GETS RID OF THE FEAR OF BEING A MAN

"In 18 states of this country, what we are carrying in this car would be enough to get us a life sentence." That's what my lawyer was saying. An extraordinary specimen. With his irrefutably confident manner, like someone who had just seen God and received from him the confirmation that, yes, he had indeed caused a bit of a mess down here. The only thing that clashed with that celestial, reassuring certainty of his was the ether-soaked handkerchief that he brought under his nostrils every 30 seconds, inhaling generously and then rolling his eyes, once again surprised by a gesture that should have been more than familiar to him. Do not think, good and honest people, that he was reckless or, my God, a raving lunatic. He was simply, wonderfully, once again intoxicated by the ecstasy of hallucinogenic substances. And I was no less, I had to have the necessary lucidity to describe what others have defined as "a wild ride into the heart of the American dream."
Well, if we found ourselves there in the middle, then it must have been the gut, judging by the fauna that lived there... And what was I supposed to do, pray tell? Ask it when the war would end, when it would look through the grave, when it would return angelic, when it would finally become worthy of the millions of poor souls occupying it? No. Besides, others had done that before me. It wasn't my role. Dr. Gonzo and I were perfectly maladjusted from all of that; not exactly outcasts, I would say more like outsiders. Sure, sick and twisted children, but somehow emerged PURE. Absolutely. And certainly better than the millions afflicted with "survivalism": wandering like zombies through shopping malls or pay-TV after a nuclear blast, alive without knowing why, and hungry. And I dread to think what we might have done if, instead of ending up in Las Vegas, we had been catapulted by some twist of fate into your cheerful little town, but so it is... We were there, in the dazzling, Dante-esque belly of our dear mother, a kind of delirious Bosch painting seen from the television. It had to mean something. Shoved aside, looked down on by everyone, poorly tolerated. Ironic, isn't it? Like a plague boil looking disgustedly at its own purulent swellings.
I didn't know how it would end, but we had to set an example, continue to showcase our functional lifestyle, ignored and overlooked but undeterred. As I've said elsewhere, prototypes of God, too weird to live and too rare to die.

P.s. Certainly this isn't to say "do drugs!", but at least pretend, damn it!

P.p.s. In Vietnam, they filled marines with amphetamines and valium... I would have been the perfect soldier...

Yours
Raoul Duke