ABSTRACT
Hunter S. Thompson enters the scene. A surviving photograph in the New York Times archives has him and Zeta sitting together at the Caesar's Palace bar in Las Vegas. Its 3 a.m. on April 26, 1971, some two weeks after his thirty-sixth birthday. Zeta looks exhausted. He is wearing an expensive lawyer's suit and a flashy tie. His left hand, covered with a black glove, is under his chin. He is drinking Tequila with salt and lemon. Thompson, an admirer of Mohammed Ali and George McGovern, smoking and drinking as well, is more casually dressed: He is wearing glasses, a Safari hat, and sneakers. He also has his left hand under his chin, in a gesture of meditation. Both have a tongue-in-cheek expression: They look serious, professional, but in truth they are totally lost. Their paths crossed when Thompson suggested to his editor at Rolling Stone a piece on police brutality in East Los Angeles, which would end up being "Strange Rumblings in Aztlán." The central theme was the death of Rubén Salazar, killed by the LAPD 97in 1971, at the height of the La Raza movement. According to Paul Perry, author of the 1992 volume Fear and Loathing: The Strange and Terrible Saga of Hunter S. Thompson , the gunman was captured later but not arrested, and Saiazar had quickly become a legendary martyr. Zeta had met Salazar, recognizable in The Revolt of the Cockroach People as Roland Zanzibar, when the journalist interviewed him for KMEX radio station in Los Angeles. He described the encounter in the present tense: "[Salazar] appears relaxed and after a brief conversation I feel that I have his confidence. The talk is warm and friendly and he seems genuinely interested in the subject. It is not simply another day of work for him. He gauges my own sympathies. He knows that the event has great meaning for me. And, from newspaper articles, I know he is regarded as a veteran journalist by his own peers. He has recently returned from Vietnam and has a weekly column in the largest newspaper west of Chicago, the Los Angeles Times. Stonewall comes off like an angry baboon in comparison."
