Oscar Acosta
By Marty
Here is a link to a good piece about Oscar and the Doc called When Zeta met Hunter, by Greg Barrios. http://www.sacurrent.com/arts/story.asp?id=69107
Oscar Zeta Acosta, born in 1935, it’s unknown when he died but most say 1974.
(From Wiki)In 1974. Acosta disappeared while traveling in Mexico. His son, Marco Acosta, believes that he was the last person to talk to his father. In May 1974, Acosta telephoned his son, telling him that he was “about to board a boat full of white snow.” Marco is later quoted in reference to his father’s disappearance: “The body was never found, but we surmise that probably, knowing the people he was involved with, he ended up mouthing off, getting into a fight, and getting killed.”
According to Thompson’s obituary of Acosta “Fear and Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird: The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat”, Acosta was a powerful attorney and preacher but suffered from an addiction to amphetamines as well as a predilection for LSD-25. The obituary alternates from vitriolic to touching, but on the whole conveys the sense that Acosta was a man who felt he was doomed to martyrdom and destined to be a messiah, but was brought down by his inability to be either. The article was Thompson’s response to rumors that Acosta was alive somewhere around Miami.
In reference to Acosta’s death, Thompson allegedly told interviewers, “…and someone onboard shot him two or three times in the stomach, with a .45. Then threw him over the side.
Hunter S. Thompson said of Oscar in Rolling Stone #254, Dec. 15, 1977
“Oscar was not into serious street-fighting, but he was hell on wheels in a bar brawl. Any combination of a 250 lb Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach – but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs and a de facto suicidal conviction that he will die at the age of 33 – just like Jesus Christ – you have a serious piece of work on your hands. Especially if the bastard is already 33 1/2 years old with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded .357 Magnum in his belt, a hatchet-wielding Chicano bodyguard on his elbow at all times, and a disconcerting habit of projectile vomiting geysers of pure blood off the front porch every 30 or 40 minutes, or whenever his malignant ulcer can’t handle any more raw tequila.”
