October 9, 2005
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride (Pt. 7 and Final)
“One owes respect to the living: To the Dead one owes only the truth.”
—Voltaire (via HST)
One last thing.
I went on at great length about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas the other day, but I didn’t quite finish the thought. In additon to being all the things I said it was, Fear and Loathing is one thing that is often—maybe always—overlooked: a story of friendship. Specifically, the friendship between Hunter Thompson and his attorney, drug buddy, and partner in crime, Oscar Zeta Acosta.
Much of Thompson’s work is shot through with a peculiar kind of loneliness; however much people might have found it exciting to be around him, no one could take it for very long. Artist Ralph Steadman often served as the Doctor’s sidekick and straight man, but after a few days he would usually be on the edge of a nervous breakdown and have to return to England for lengthy recuperation.
In Acosta, the Doctor finally found someone who was truly on his wavelength, someone who could keep up with his relentless pace, superhuman drug intake, and general love of chaos. In fact, in Fear and Loathing, it’s Thompson who’s the sane one, the voice of reason, and Acosta who’s constantly flirting with going over the edge. I’ve always loved this passage from midway through the book (if possible, it should be read with an endless loop of the Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow playing in the background):
My attorney was in the bathtub when I returned. Submerged in green water — the oily product of some Japanese bath salts he’d picked up in the hotel gift shop, along with a new AM/FM radio plugged into the electric razor socket. Top volume. Some gibberish by a thing called “Three Dog Night,” about a frog named Jeremiah who wanted “Joy to the World.”
First Lennon, now this, I thought. Next we’ll have Glen Campbell screaming “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”
Where indeed? No flowers in this town. Only carnivorous plants. I turned the volume down and noticed a hunk of chewed-up white paper beside the radio. My attorney seemed not to notice the sound-change. He was lost in a fog of green steam; only half his head was visible above the water line.
“You ate this?” I asked, holding up the white pad.
He ignored me. But I knew. He would be very difficult to reach for the next six hours. The whole blotter was chewed up.
“You evil son of a bitch,” I said. “You better hope there’s some Thorazine in that bag, because if there’s not you’re in bad trouble tomorrow.”
“Music!” he snarled. “Turn it up. Put that tape on.”
“What tape?”
“The new one. It’s right there.”
I picked up the radio and noticed that it was also a tape recorder — one of those things with a cassette-unit built in. And the tape, Surrealistic Pillow, needed only to be flipped over.
He had already gone through side one — at a volume that must have been audible in every room within a radius of one hundred yards, walls and all.
” ‘White Rabbit,’ ” he said. “I want a rising sound.”
“You’re doomed,” I said. “I’m leaving here in two hours — and then they’re going to come up here and beat the mortal shit out of you with big saps. Right there in the tub.”
“I dig my own graves,” he said. “Green water and the White Rabbit…put it on; don’t make me use this.” His arm lashed out of the water, the hunting knife gripped in his fist.
“Jesus,” I muttered. At that point I figured he was beyond help — lying there in the tub with a head full of acid and the sharpest knife I’ve ever seen, totally incapable of reason, demanding the White Rabbit. This is it, I thought. I’ve gone as far as I can with this waterhead. This time it’s a suicide trip. This time he wants it. He’s ready….
“OK,” I said, turning the tape over and pushing the “play” button. “But do me one last favor, will you? Can you give me two hours? That’s all I ask — just two hours to sleep before tomorrow. I suspect it’s going to be a very difficult day.”
“Of course,” he said. “I’m your attorney. I’ll give you all the time you need, at my normal rates: $45 an hour — but you’ll be wanting a cushion, so why don’t you just lay one of those $100 bills down there beside the radio, and fuck off?”
“How about a check?” I said. “On the Sawtooth National Bank. You won’t need any ID to cash it there. They know me.”
“Whatever’s right,” he said, beginning to jerk with the music. The bathroom was like the inside of a huge defective woofer. Heinous vibrations, overwhelming sound. The floor was full of water. I moved the radio as far from the tub as it would go, then I left and closed the door behind me.
Within seconds he was shouting at me. “Help! You bastard! I need help!”
I rushed back inside, thinking he’d sliced off an ear by accident.
But no…he was reaching across the bathroom toward the white formica shelf where the radio sat. “I want that fuckin radio,” he snarled.
I grabbed it away from his hand. “You fool!” I said. “Get back in that tub! Get away from that goddamn radio!” I shoved it back from his hand. The volume was so far up that it was hard to know what was playing unless you knew Surrealistic Pillow almost note for note…which I did, at the time, so I knew that “White Rabbit” had finished; the peak had come and gone.
But my attorney, it seemed, had not made it. He wanted more. “Back the tape up!” he yelled. “I need it again!” His eyes were full of craziness now, unable to focus. He seemed on the verge of some awful psychic orgasm….
“Let it roll!” he screamed. “Just as high as the fucker can go! And when it comes to that fantastic note where the rabbit bites its own head off, I want you to throw that fuckin radio into the tub with me.”
I stared at him, keeping a firm grip on the radio. “Not me,” I said finally. “I’d be happy to ram a goddamn 440-volt cattle prod into that tub with you right now, but not this radio. It would blast you right through the wall — stone-dead in ten seconds.” I laughed. “Shit, they’d make me explain it — drag me down to some rotten coroner’s inquest and grill me about…yes…the exact details. I don’t need that.”
“Bullshit!” he screamed. “Just tell them I wanted to get Higher!”
I thought for a moment. “Okay,” I said finally. “You’re right. This is probably the only solution.” I picked up the tape/radio — which was still plugged in — and held it over the tub. “Just let me make sure I have it all lined up,” I said. “You want me to throw this thing into the tub when ‘White Rabbit’ peaks — is that it?”
He fell back in the water and smiled gratefully. “Fuck yes,” he said. “I was beginning to think I was going to have to go out and get one of the goddamn maids to do it.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Are you ready?” I hit the “play” button and “White Rabbit” started building again. Almost immediately he began to howl and moan…another fast run up that mountain, and thinking, this time, that he would finally get over the top. His eyes were gripped shut and only his head and both kneecaps poked up through the oily green water.
I let the song build while I sorted through the pile of fat ripe grapefruit next to the basin. The biggest one of the lot weighed almost two pounds. I got a good Vida Blue fastball grip on the fucker — and just as “White Rabbit” peaked I lashed it into the tub like a cannonball.
My attorney screamed crazily, thrashing around in the tub like a shark after meat, churning water all over the floor as he struggled to get hold of something.
I jerked the AC cord out of the tape/radio and moved out of the bathroom very quickly…the machine kept on playing, but now it was back on its own harmless battery power. I could hear the beat cooling down as I moved across the room to my kitbag and fetched up the Mace can….
Unfortunately, as it turned out, Acosta really was doomed, really was on a messianic suicide trip of some kind. He disappeared in 1974 and was never heard from again, for reasons that have never been made entirely clear, although there have been various theories over the years. In Breakfast with Hunter, Thompson says that he was murdered at sea and dumped overboard.
The Doctor’s eyes light up when he talks about Acosta in the movie, and it seems he never entirely got over the loss. In 1977 he wrote an angry, heartfelt requiem entitled “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat.”
Oscar Zeta Acosta — despite any claims to the contrary — was a dangerous thug who lived every day of his life as a stalking momument to the notion that a man with a greed for the truth should expect no mercy and give none…
…and that was the difference between Oscar and a lot of the merciless geeks he liked to tell strangers he admired; class acts like Fatty Arbuckle and Benito Mussolini.
When the great scorer comes to write against Oscar’s name, one of the first few lines in the Ledger will note that he usually lacked the courage of his consistently monstrous convictions. There was more mercy, madness, dignity and generosity in that overweight, overworked and always overindulged brown cannonball of a body than most of us will meet in any human package even three times Oscar’s size for the rest of our lives — which are all running noticeably leaner on the high side, since that rotten fat spic disappeared.
Thompson goes on to detail how Acosta, whose contribution to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is inestimable, nearly torpedoed the book at the last moment, for an utterly perverse reason:
He was, as I’d said, not concerned at all by the libels. Of course they were all true, he said when I finally reached him by phone at the Hotel Synaloa.
The only thing that bothered him — bothered him very badly — was the fact that I’d repeatedly described him as a 300-pound Samoan.
“What kind of Journalist are you?” he screamed at me. “Don’t you have any respect for the truth? I can sink that whole publishing house for defaming me, trying to pass me off as one of those waterhead South Sea mongrels.”
The libel lawyers were stunned into paranoid silence. “Was it either some kind of arcane legal trick,” they wondered, “or was this dope-addled freak really crazy enough to insist on having himself formally identified for all time, with one of the most depraved and degenerate figures in American literature?”
Should his angry threats and demands conceivably be taken seriously? Was it possible that a well-known practicing attorney might not only freely admit to all these heinous crimes, but insist that every foul detail be documented as the absolute truth?
“Why not?” Oscar answered. And the only way he’d sign the release, he added, was in exchange for a firm guarantee from the lawyers that both his name and a suitable photograph of himself be prominently displayed on the book’s dust cover.
That very photograph, a shot of Thompson and Acosta at Caesar’s Palace, can be found at the top of this page. These two guys were clearly cut from the same cloth, and it is a moving testament to something or other that the hillbilly from Kentucky and the Chicano from Riverbank, California could be so much like brothers. They were so much alike, in fact, that Dr. Thompson’s last words on Oscar Acosta could just as well serve as his own elegy. Which is what I’m going to let them do here, as I bring this ride to a close with the Good Doctor himself getting the last word, which is one thing he certainly deserves.
What began as a quick and stylish epitaph…has long since gone out of control. Not even [he] would have wanted an obituary with no end….
[He] was one of God’s own prototypes — a high-powered mutant of some kind who was never even considered for mass production. He was too weird to live and too rare to die — and as far as I’m concerned, that’s just about all that needs to be said about him right now….
We are better off without him. Sooner or later he would have had to be put to sleep anyway…. So the world is a better place, now that he’s at least out of sight, if not certifiably dead.
He will not be missed — except perhaps in Fat City, where every light in town went dim when we heard he’d finally cashed his check.
Posted by bill at 11:59 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 8, 2005
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride (Pt. 6)
Although labeled “Dr. Gonzo,” this Ralph Steadman illustration actually depicts Raoul Duke, a.k.a. Hunter S. Thompson.
When I started this screed almost two months ago, I had no idea that it would absorb all my writing energy, if not my life, for so long…but here we are, it’s a cool day in October, the days are getting noticeably shorter, and in some ways I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. But fuck it, sooner or later this thread is going to have to be terminated to make room for whatever comes next. There are just a few loose ends I feel obligated to tie up first.
In examining what makes Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas tick, I omitted for simplicity’s sake one factor that I would be remiss in not mentioning: the contribution of Ralph Steadman, the illustrator. It just wouldn’t have been the same book without his depictions of Raoul Duke, Dr. Gonzo, and the various Vegas citizens, cops, and lizards that they enounter in the course of their adventures.
And above and beyond that he contributed the distinctive crude lettering and the weird ink blotches that occur throughout the book, sometimes obscuring bits of text and adding a unique element of chaos. This is why no version of Fear and Loathing in any other medium has ever been quite satisfying…it was meant to be a book and should be left that way (with all due respect to Mr. Gilliam).
Unlike “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” or The Curse of Lono, Steadman is not a character in Fear and Loathing, just the artist—a fact over which he apparently harbors some resentment, because in the film Breakfast with Hunter, filmed 30 years later, he is seen complaining to Thompson about not being invited along on the Vegas trip. Even so, the two remained friends until the Doctor’s death, which is fairly remarkable given that Thompson tended to drag Steadman along on stories that turned out to be twisted, drunken nightmares.
Their friendship was based, I think, on a similar way of looking at the world, which you can see in their work. Both were very highly attuned to the horror in the world, and took a perverse pride in having such insight into the true nature of things. Thompson put it this way:
There’s an element of reality, even in Ralph’s most grotesque drawings. He catches things. Using a sort of venomous, satirical approach, he exaggerates the two or three things that horrify him in a scene or situation… And you can say that these people didn’t look exactly like that, but when you can look at them again it seems pretty damn close. All the cops in the Vegas hotel lobby are wearing the same plaid Bermuda shorts, and they’re uglier than any group of mutants you’d see at a bad insane asylum — you know, for the criminally insane. But I look back at that scene and I know they weren’t much different, really. They had on different colored shirts and they weren’t all crazy and dangerous-looking — but he caught the one or two distinguishing characteristics among them: the beady eyes, burr haircuts, weasel teeth, beer bellies. If you exaggerate those four characteristics, you get a pretty grisly drawing….
If Thompson and Steadman accomplished one thing in their work together, it was to make us see many awful truths that otherwise might have escaped us. Which is not pleasant, but often necessary. And those of us who are interested in carrying on that work ought to be taking a long, hard, unflinching look at the horrors around us—not to wallow in them, but to recognize them and hopefully know how to deal with them. In the wake of the Bush administration’s latest fuckups, it seems that many new sets of eyes are being opened to the true nature of that particular band of swine, and after five years of national shame there may again be reason for hope.
In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile — and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep…but we owe it especially to our children, who will have to live with our loss and all its long term consequences. I don’t want my son asking me, in 1984, why his friends are calling me a “Good German.”
- HST, 1971
As a sometime student of history I’ve never been comfortable with the notion that history repeats himself, but even so I had to admit that 2004 felt a lot like 1972, when America re-elected a morally crippled president in full knowledge of what it was doing, sending all right-thinking people into a spiralling depression. Course I was only five years old back then, and my knowledge is second-hand, but I think the point stands; so if last year was 72, that makes this 1973, when the tide turned, and many chickens began the return trip home to the roost. This may be why many of the Doctor’s words seem relevant in the context of 2005.
At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles — a restless idealism on the one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other — that kept me going.
—The Rum Diary
At one point I raised but never really adressed the question, “What is Gonzo journalism, really?” The answer, I think, is really quite simple, as expressed in this quote from Paul Perry’s Thompson biography:
Hunter has tried to describe Gonzo many times, but his most succinct answer to the question “what is Gonzo?” is, “Gonzo is what I do.”
Fact is, there only ever was one Gonzo journalist, and there will never be another one.
Which reminds me, I recently came across an Onion story from March entitled “National Gonzo Press Club Vows to Carry on Thompson’s Work.” It’s ruthlessly funny in the patented Onion style, but also a heartfelt tribute in its own way, and well worth a read.
Meanwhile, Rolling Stone recently published what appear to be Dr. Thompson’s real last words, in the form of a note he left for his wife Anita four days before he died.
Football Season Is Over
No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won’t hurt
But that’s pretty much of a bummer, and no note to close on. I prefer this Thompson philosophy from another time:
I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness. But as long as I know I can get my hands on either one of them once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots.
I’ve always loved that quote, and I think I understand it more and more with every passing year. We always think we’re going to reach that Promised Land: final truth, enlightenment, closure, total happiness or perfect art. Well, forget it; it’s not going to happen, and even if it did, it would only last for a fleeting moment and then things would start changing again.
The Doctor was fond of this quote from Joseph Conrad: “Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.”
Translation: Tomorrow is not promised to us; do what you can today.
And, OK, if things go south on us, if today turns out to be fucked, maybe there will be a tomorrow. We can certainly hope so. But the point is, we took our best shot at today.
He was also fond of this quote from Henry James, which seems like a good place to leave off: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.”
Posted by bill at 7:30 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 7, 2005
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride (Pt. 5)
After a long and perilous journey, we have now arrived where I wanted to get to in the first place, which is Las Vegas.
I was 16 years old when I first read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and it changed my life—not entirely for the better, but that’s water under the bridge now. Like a great early experience with sex, drugs, or rock’n’roll, it was the kind of rush you find yourself chasing after for a long time, and never quite recapturing.
In my relatively sober middle age I find myself asking questions like, why is Fear and Loathing so great—or, to put it another way, what’s so great about it? Why is it so much fun, when its subject matter is not just fear and loathing, but also paranoia and disillusionment? And what is it, exactly, when you get right down to it?
To answer those questions—or at least come up with a reasonable-sounding response—you need to look at how it came to be.
According to Dr. Thompson’s 1971 jacket copy—which didn’t make it into the actual book but is anthologized in The Great Shark Hunt—Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas started off as “a 250-word caption for Sports Illustrated.” The year was 1970, and the assignment was to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race in Las Vegas, an assignment which Thompson accepted only because he needed a break from the high-pressure situation he was immersed in:
I was down in LA, working on a very tense and depressing investigation of the allegedly accidental killing of a journalist named Ruben Salazar by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. — and after a week or so on the story I was a ball of nerves & sleepless paranoia (figuring that I might be next)…and I needed some excuse to get away from the angry vortex of that story & try to make sense of it without people shaking butcher knives in my face all the time.
The people shaking the butcher knives were associates of Thompson’s friend Oscar Zeta Acosta, a Chicano attorney who was a key figure in the ongoing struggle between LA’s Mexican-American community and city authorities. Thompson had met Acosta in Colorado in 1967, and he describes that first meeting this way:
When he came booming into a bar called the Daisy Duck in Aspen and announced that he was the trouble we’d all been waiting for, he was definitely into the politics of confrontation — and on all fronts: in the bars or the courts or even the streets, if necessary.
Oscar was not into serious street-fighting, but he was hell on wheels in a bar brawl. Any combination of a 250-pound 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 thirty-three — just like Jesus Christ — you have a serious piece of work on your hands. Specially if the bastard is already thirty-three and a half 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 red blood off the front porch every thirty or forty minutes, or whenever his malignant ulcer can’t handle any more raw tequila.
Thompson seems to have immediately recognized a kindred spirit in Acosta, but their friendship was severely tested by the circumstances they found themselves in three years later. Acosta was an important guy in his community by then, having run for sheriff of LA county on a Brown Power platform the year before, and was constantly surrounded by angry Chicano militants. It was this set of conditions that led directly to the events that became Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
I found it impossible to talk to Oscar alone. We were always in the midst of a crowd of heavy street-fighters who didn’t mind letting me know that they wouldn’t need much of an excuse to chop me into hamburger.
This is no way to work on a very volatile & very complex story. So one afternoon I got Oscar in my rented car and drove him over to the Beverly Hills Hotel — away from his bodyguards etc. — and told him I was getting a bit wiggy from the pressure; it was like being on stage all the time, or maybe in the midst of a prison riot. He agreed, but the nature of his position as “leader of the militants” made it impossible for him to be openly friendly with a gabacho.
I understood this…and just about then, I remembered that another old friend, now working for Sports Illustrated, had asked me if I felt like going out to Vegas for the weekend, at their expense, and writing a few words about a motorcycle race. This seemed like a good excuse to get out of LA for a few days, and if I took Oscar along it would also give us time to talk and sort out the evil realities of the Salazar/Murder story.
So I called Sports Illustrated — from the patio of the Polo Lounge — and said I was ready to do the “Vegas thing.” They agreed…and from here on in there is no point in running down the details, because they’re all in the book.
The book, in case you haven’t read it (in which case I envy you, because the first time is the best), opens in a wild careening rush. Thompson and Acosta—for literary purposes thinly disguised as “Raoul Duke” and his 300-pound Samoan attorney “Dr. Gonzo”—are on their way from LA to Vegas, free of all responsibilties and entanglements, having just gobbled an assortment of psychedelic drugs.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.
It was almost noon, and we still had more than a hundred miles to go. They would be tough miles. Very soon, I knew, we would both be completely twisted. But there was no going back, and no time to rest. We would have to ride it out. Press registration for the fabulous Mint 400 was already underway, and we had to get there by four to claim our sound-proof suite. A fashionable sporting magazine in New York had taken care of the reservations, along with this huge red Chevy convertible we’d just rented off a lot on the Sunset Strip…and I was, after all, a professional journalist; so I had an obligation to cover the story, for good or ill.
The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.
After a strange encounter with a hitchhiker—during which Dr. Gonzo utters the famous words “”We’re your friends…we’re not like the others”—our heroes arrive in Vegas, out of their heads on LSD and seeing lizards everywhere, and must deal with the difficult ordeal of checking into their hotel.
There is no way to explain the terror I felt when I finally lunged up to the clerk and began babbling. All my well-rehearsed lines fell apart under that woman’s stoney glare. “Hi there,” I said. “My name is…ah, Raoul Duke..yes, on the list, that’s for sure. Free lunch, final wisdom, total coverage…why not? I have my attorney with me and I realize of course that his name is not on the list, but we must have that suite, yes, this man is actually my driver. We brought this Red Shark all the way from the Strip and now it’s time for the desert, right? Yes. Just check the list and you’ll see. Don’t worry. What’s the score here? What’s next?”
The woman never blinked. “Your room’s not ready yet,” she said. “But there’s somebody looking for you.”
“No!” I shouted. “Why? We haven’t done anything yet!” My legs felt rubbery. I gripped the desk and sagged toward her as she held out the envelope, but I refused to accept it. The woman’s face was changing: swelling, pulsing…horrible green jowls and fangs jutting out, the face of a Moray Eel! Deadly poison! I lunged backwards into my attorney, who gripped my arm as he reached out to take the note. “I’ll handle this,” he said to the Moray woman. “This man has a bad heart, but I have plenty of medicine. My name is Dr. Gonzo. Prepare our suite at once. We’ll be in the bar.”
The woman shrugged as he led me away. In a town full of bedrock crazies, no one even notices an acid freak.
When they finally get into their suite, things calm down a bit, and the next day an attempt is made to actually cover the motorcycle race. They quickly learn, however, that there’s not much to cover; immediately upon leaving the starting line, the racers generate a huge could of dust that makes it impossible to see much of anything. Every so often a lone motorcylist appears out of the dust, refuels, and quickly disappears again; that’s about it.
As a result, Duke/Thompson soon loses interest in the Mint 400, which is probably why Sports Illustrated rejected with extreme prejudice the 2500 words that he eventually submitted. I doubt the Doctor cared much because by then, the Vegas story had become something far larger in his mind. In the jacket copy he talks about what he was trying to do, and how well he thinks he did it:
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism. My idea was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication — without editing. That way, I felt, the eye & mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera. The writing would be selective & necessarily interpretive — but once the image was written, the words would be final; in the same way that a Cartier-Bresson photograph is always (he says) the full-frame negative. No alterations in the darkroom, no cutting or cropping, no spotting…no editing.
But this is a hard thing to do, and in the end I found myself imposing an essentially fictional framework on what began as a piece of straight/crazy journalism.
And now we’re getting (finally) to the point…if Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas isn’t really Gonzo journalism, what is it exactly? You could call it a meditation on the end of the sixties; a bold indictment of the lies and avarice at the heart of the American dream; or the self-indulgent, rambling diary of a drug fiend. And it is all of that, sure.
But to me, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas above all else is a testament to the power of freedom—the sheer joy that comes from letting go of all constraints and seeing what happens. Duke and Gonzo the characters do whatever they please and get away with it; Thompson the writer writes whatever he pleases and gets away with it. As readers, we get to go along for the ride.
Fear and Loathing’s epigraph comes from Samuel Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Remember, the Vegas trip started as a way to escape from the pressure of the Salazar situation; and Dr. Thompson wrote the book to get away from the pressure of writing the Salazar story:
I began writing it during a week of hard typewriter nights in a room at the Ramada Inn — in a place called Arcadia, California — up the road from Pasadena & right across the street from the Santa Anita racetrack. I was there during the first week of Spring Racing — and the rooms all around me were jammed with people I couldn’t quite believe.
Heavy track buffs, horse trainers, ranch owners, jockeys & their women…I was lost in that swarm, sleeping most of each day and writing all night on the Salazar article. But each night, around dawn, I would knock off the Salazar work and spend an hour or so, cooling out, by letting my head unwind and my fingers run wild on the big black Selectric…jotting down notes about the weird trip to Vegas. It had worked out nicely, in terms of the Salazar piece — plenty of hard straight talk about who was lying and who wasn’t, and Oscar had finally relaxed enough to talk to me straight. Flashing across the desert at 100 in a big red convertible with the top down, there is not much danger of being bugged or overheard.
But we stayed in Vegas a bit longer than we’d planned to. Or at least I did. Oscar had to get back for a nine o’clock court appearance on Monday. So he took the plane and I was left alone out there — just me and a massive hotel bill that I knew I couldn’t pay, and the treacherous reality of that scene caused me to spend about 36 straight hours in my room at the Mint Hotel…writing feverishly in a notebook about a nasty situation that I thought I might not get away from.
These notes were the genesis of Fear and Loathing. After my escape from Nevada and all through the tense work week that followed (spending all my afternoons on the grim streets of East LA and my nights on the typewriter in that Ramada Inn hideout)…my only loose & human moments would come when I could relax and fuck around with this slow-building, stone-crazy Vegas story.
By the time I got back to the Rolling Stone Hq. in San Francisco, the Salazar story was winding out at around 19,000 words, and the strange Vegas “fantasy” was running on its own spaced energy and pushing 5000 words — with no end in sight and no real reason to continue working on it, except the pure pleasure of unwinding on paper. It was sort of an exercise — like Bolero — and it might have stayed that way if Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone, hadn’t liked the first 20 or so jangled pages enough to take it seriously on its own terms and tentatively schedule it for publication — which gave me the push I needed to keep working on it….
The only other important thing to be said about Fear and Loathing at this time is that it was fun to write, and that’s rare — for me, at least, because I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling.
Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over & over, again & again — or else you’ll be evicted, and that gets old. It’s a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig that, even in retrospect, was a kinghell, highlife fuckaround from start to finish — and then to actually get paid for writing this kind of maniac gibberish seems genuinely weird; like getting paid for kicking Agnew in the balls.
(Note: For those of you born in the last part of the 20th century, Spiro Agnew served as vice president under Thompson’s arch-nemesis Richard Nixon until he was booted for being too visibly corrupt and replaced by Gerald Ford. The modern-day equivalent would be getting to empty a can of pepper spray on Dick Cheney…or better yet, G.W. Bush himself.)
And there’s the hook, the thing that made people take to Fear and Loathing and keeps them coming back to it thirty-odd years later: It’s fun to read because it was fun to write. It’s the work of a genius-level prose stylist working with no concern for commercial considerations, absolutely unfettered by decorum, conscience, or fear of consequences. It’s a trip, it’s a ride, and it shouldn’t be taken too seriously—and certainly not emulated.
Well, that seems like as good a place as any to leave off for now, before things can mushroom any further out of bounds. I will have a few more thoughts in the next couple days, but take heart—the end is near.
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September 17, 2005
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride (Pt. 4)
“I’d like to do a book on people who play polo and give me a lot of free booze. I got tired of living in that Hell’s Angels world…and fooling around in a lot of crummy bars.” -HST, 1968
The Gonzo era began in earnest with an article called “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” which Dr. Thompson wrote for Scanlan’s Monthly in 1970. If you’ve never read it, I encourage you to do so right now; it’s a funny and quick read, only about 14 pages. Here’s a link if you need one (you’re probably going to want to print it out; or better yet, just get a copy of The Great Shark Hunt).
In the years since his sojourn in the Haight-Ashbury, the Doctor had talked football with Richard Nixon, then almost accidentally blown up Nixon’s plane while lighting a cigarette; been beaten and thrown through a plate glass window by Chicago police at the 1968 Democratic convention; and masterminded the “Freak Power” campaign of Joe Edwards, who came within a few votes of becoming mayor of Aspen, where Thompson had settled after leaving California.
Encouraged by Edwards’ showing, Thompson decided to run for sheriff of Aspen on a Freak Power ticket. Here are some excerpts from his platform:
1) Sod all the streets at once. Rip up all city streets with jackhammers and use the junkasphalt (after melting) to create a huge parking and auto-storage lot on the outskirts of town…. All public movement would be by foot and a fleet of bicycles, maintained by the city police force.
2) Change the name “Aspen,” by public referendum, to “Fat City.” This would prevent greedheads, land-rapers and other human jackals from capitalizing on the name “Aspen.” Thus, Snowmass-at-Aspen — recently sold to Kaiser/Aetna of Oakland — would become “Snowmass-at-Fat City.” And the main advantage here is that changing the name of the town would have no major effect on the town itself, or on those people who came here because it’s a good place to live. What effect the name change might have on those who came here to buy low, sell high and move on is fairly obvious…and eminently desirable. These swine should be fucked, broken and driven across the land.
3) Drug Sales must be controlled. My first act as Sheriff will be to install, on the courthouse lawn, a bastinado platform and a set of stocks — in order to punish dishonest dope dealers in a proper public fashion…. It will be the general philosophy of the Sheriff’s office that no drug worth taking should be sold for money. Non-profit sales will be viewed as borderline cases, and judged on their merits. But all sales for money-profit will be punished severely. This approach, we feel, will establish a unique and very human ambiance in the Aspen (or Fat City) drug culture.
4) Hunting and fishing should be forbidden to all non-residents, with the exception of those who can obtain the signed endorsement of a resident — who will then be legally responsible for any violation or abuse committed by the non-resident he has “signed for.” Fines will be heavy and the general policy will be Merciless Prosecution of All Offenders.
5) The Sheriff and his Deputies should never be armed in public. Every urban riot, shoot-out and blood-bath (involving guns) in recent memory has been set off by some trigger-happy cop in a fear frenzy. And no cop in Aspen has had to use a gun for so many years that I feel safe in offering a $12 cash reward to anybody who can recall such an incident in writing. (Box K-3, Aspen.) Under normal circumstances a pistol-grip Mace-bomb, such as the MK-V made by General Ordnance, is more than enough to quickly wilt any violence-problem that is likely to emerge in Aspen. And anything the MK-V can’t handle would require reinforcements anyway…in which case the response would be geared at all times to Massive Retaliation: a brutal attack with guns, bombs, pepper-foggers, wolverines and all other weapons deemed necessary to restore the civic peace.
6) It will be the policy of the Sheriff’s office savagely to harass all those engaged in any form of land-rape. This will be done by acting, with utmost dispatch, on any and all righteous complaints. My first act in office — after setting up the machinery for punishing dope-dealers — will be to establish a Research Bureau to provide facts on which any citizen can file a Writ of Seizure, a Writ of Stoppage, a Writ of Fear, of Horror…yes…even a Writ of Assumption…against any greedhead who has managed to get around our antiquated laws and set up a tar-vat, scum-drain or gravel-pit. These writs will be pursued with overweening zeal…and always within the letter of the law. Selah.
But running a political campaign, especially one designed to outrage the local power structure, is a lot of pressure; so Thompson decided, as a way of blowing off steam, to return to his native state of Kentucky to cover the Derby. (This is very similar to the circumstances that led to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—which we will get to soon enough….)
Although it began as a kind of vacation, the Derby story had a major impact on Thompson’s career in a couple of ways. One is that it was the first time he worked with artist Ralph Steadman, whose visual style—grotesque exaggeration that conveys essential truths—was the perfect complement to the Doctor’s writing. The other had to do with how the article was put together. In his book Fear and Loathing, Paul Perry describes it thusly:
At the end of Derby week, Scanlan’s brought Hunter and Steadman to New York to put together the story. Steadman had a sketchbook full of caricatures and the worst hangover he’d ever had. Having lost his colors and drawing pencils, he borrowed lipstick and eye shadow from the wife of the managing editor and, using them, completed seven drawings in two days.
The editors put Hunter up in the Royalton Hotel and told him to produce, but nothing happened. Copyboys and secretaries made frequent trips to the room to gather pages, but they left empty-handed. Managing editor Don Goddard came to the room and had a heart-to-heart talk with Hunter. “We need something, now don’t we?” he said, his English calm hiding his desperation. “We can’t publish empty pages, can we?”
For two days nothing came out. As Hunter later described it, this was “a terminal writer’s block.” On the third day, he soaked in a hot bathtub and took counsel from a quart of White Horse Scotch that he drank straight from the bottle. He thought about the idle presses and his friend [Warren] Hinckle waiting in San Francisco for something to slap on those twelve empty pages in the front of the magazine. Finally, he ripped a few pages out of his notebook and handed them to a copyboy who was waiting to deliver them to the New York office. Then he turned on the TV and waited for an editor to call and scream a torrent of abuse. Instead the copyboy came back and said they wanted more.
Hunter read his notes and tore out more pages. A little while later, Hinckle called from San Francisco. He had received the telecopied pages from New York and he loved them. Send more.
Hunter edited his notes and handed them to the copyboy, who ran them to Goddard, who reshuffled the order of some of the material and sent it to San Francisco.
“I was full of grief and shame,” Hunter told a reporter from High Times magazine. “This time I made it, but in what I considered to be the foulest and cheapest way…. I slunk back to Colorado and said oh fuck, when it comes out I’m going to take a tremendous beating from a lot of people.”
The piece, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” was published in June 1970. Immediately Hunter started getting letters and phone calls of congratulation on a piece well done. One of those letters came from Bill Cardoza, editor of the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, who considered the piece a breakthrough in journalism. “Forget all this shit you’ve been writing, this it; this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling.”
This was the first time the word “Gonzo” was used in reference to Hunter’s work.
In the end, Thompson did not become sheriff; but he did discover a new approach to writing that would soon bear fruit in a major way.
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September 13, 2005
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride (Pt. 3)
The success of Hell’s Angels gave Dr. Thompson credibility in the world of mainstream journalism and led to an assignment from The New York Times Magazine to write about the growing hippie scene in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district.
The resulting article, called “The ‘Hashbury’ Is the Capital of the Hippies,” begins as a piece of very straight journalism. At times the Doctor sounds like one of the so-called counterculture experts he would later mock:
The word “hip” translates roughly as “wise” or “tuned-in.” A hippy is somebody who “knows” what’s really happening, and who adjusts or grooves with it.
Although there’s no way of telling how much of that is due to some stiff-necked editor at the Times. But as you read on, you can see that Thompson really has taken the time to understand what is going on in hippie culture, and is doing his best to explain it to a mainstream audience. He does an exemplary job of examining the then-new hippie phenomenon without being either judgmental or sentimental; but in the end he finds that his ability to deliver the story is hamstrung by a unique set of difficulties.
A journalist dealing with heads is caught in a strange dilemma. The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be a part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without firsthand experience is a fool and a fraud.
Yet to write from experience is an admission of felonious guilt; it is also a potential betrayal of people whose only “crime” is the smoking of a weed that grows wild all over the world but the possession of which, in California, carries a minimum sentence of two years in prison for a second offense and a minimum of five years for a third. So, despite the fact that the whole journalism industry is full of unregenerate heads — just as many journalists were hard drinkers during Prohibition — it is not very likely that the frank, documented truth about the psychedelic underworld, for good or ill, will be illuminated anytime soon in the public prints.
So the Doctor had a decision to make: To write truthfully about the drug culture he would have to include his own experiences, but to do so was career suicide. (Or at least it appeared so at the time; in the end, he got to have it both ways when magazines like Scanlan’s Monthly and Rolling Stone published the drug-fueled dispatches that made him famous.)
For a guy like Hunter Thompson, this was really no choice at all. He knew that he was in the middle of something important, and he wasn’t about to miss out on it. Here’s what he wrote about this era years later, in a famous passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run…but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant….
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” is seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L.L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket…booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change)…but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt about that….
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda…. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…
And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave….
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
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September 9, 2005
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride (Pt. 2)
Reading over Part 1, it occurs to me that what I am attempting is nothing less than a sober reappraisal of Hunter S. Thompson’s legacy. Is such a thing necessary? Is it desirable? Is it even possible? Well, never mind; I’m into it now, so there’s no sense in quitting. As the Doctor liked to say, buy the ticket, take the ride.
The whole thing hinges, I think, on the concept of Gonzo journalism. Was it a brilliant innovation or a flimsy excuse to ignore the established rules of the trade? Did it have an ethos and an objective, or was it merely a platform for fuzzy, drug-induced “insights”? Do we even know, after all this time, what it really was?
It’s hard to conceive of now, but in his early years Hunter Thompson was a relatively straight journalist, albeit one with an offbeat pedigree and a taste for exotic locales. In The Great Shark Hunt you can read a bunch of stories that he wrote for The National Observer from 1962 through 64. These were mostly filed from places like Peru and Brazil, though there are also travelogue pieces about Thompson’s home state of Kentucky and Ketchum, Idaho, where Ernest Hemingway lived the last years of his life.
Thompson’s prose style is clearly recognizable in these pieces, but they are pretty tame by his standards, mostly sticking to the what, where, when and who of things. Apparently he was conducting his own personal drug experiments at the time—according to a Rolling Stone article by Mikal Gilmore, it was South American coca leaves and speed that caused his hair to fall out before he turned 30—but this does not find its way into The Work.
In the mid-60s Thompson moved to the Bay Area (talk about being in the right place at the right time…). Soon after arriving he accepted an assignment from The Nation to write a story about the Hell’s Angels, who were getting a lot of press at the time because of an alleged rape incident in Monterey. However, as Thompson notes in Hell’s Angels—the book that grew out of his magazine articles—nobody had told the real story of the Angels yet, because most journalists were too scared to get close enough to write it. And with good reason: The Angels were a closed society hostile toward all outsiders, especially journalists, whom they loathed at least as much as cops—and maybe more.
Hunter S. Thompson was the perfect guy to take on this challenge. He was big enough and tough enough not to be frightened of the Angels, and jaded enough not to be seduced by their outlaw mystique. He also understood what was going to be necessary to get the story. Spending a day or a week with the Angels wasn’t going to cut it; he would have to become part of their scene, gain their trust, or at least enough of it that they would let him stay around until the job was done. This, I think, is the first glimmer of the Gonzo method: If the truth is hidden from outsiders, the only way to get the story is to become part of it.
It is interesting to read Hell’s Angels now and see that the first 50 pages or so read a lot like the National Observer articles—filled with Thompsonesque locution and vocabulary, but still within a traditional journalistic framework, and always narrated in the third person. But as the book goes on, the line between the writer and the story starts to blur, and the word “I” starts to crop up a lot:
By the middle of summer I had become so involved in the outlaw scene that I was no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hell’s Angels or slowly being absorbed by them. I found myself spending two or three days each week in Angel bars, in their homes, and on runs and parties. In the beginning I kept them out of my own world, but after several months my friends grew accustomed to finding Hell’s Angels in my apartment at any hour of the day or night.
And this makes perfect sense; if you’re part of the story, why write in the third person? If Gonzo has a philosophy, this is it: Objectivity is for pussies. If you want to write about something, get inside it and really understand it. Anything else is a cop-out.
There are dangers to this way of doing things, of course. For one thing, Thompson ended up getting severely beaten by the Angels when he inadvertently offended them. More to the point, when the Doctor became a celebrity in later years, his involvement would often overwhelm and subsume whatever story he was supposedly covering. But at this early stage it is the perfect marriage of method and subject, enabling him to write about the Hell’s Angels with this kind of eloquence and understanding:
The farther the Angels roam from their own turf, the more likely they are to cause panic. A group of them seen on a highway for the first time is offensive to every normal notion of what is supposed to be happening in this country; it is bizarre to the point of seeming like a bad hallucination…and this is the context in which the term “outlaw” makes real sense. To see a lone Angel screaming through traffic — defying all rules, limits and patterns — is to understand the motorcycle as an instrument of anarchy, a tool of defiance and even a weapon. A Hell’s Angel on foot can look pretty foolish. Their sloppy histrionics and inane conversations can be interesting for a few hours, but beyond the initial strangeness, their everyday scene is as tedious and depressing as a costume ball for demented children. There is something pathetic about a bunch of grown men gathering every night in the same bar, taking themselves very seriously in their ratty uniforms, with nothing to look forward to but the chance of a fight or a round of head jobs from some drunken charwoman.
But there is nothing pathetic about the sight of an Angel on his bike. The whole — man and machine together — is far more than the sum of its parts. His motorcycle is the one thing in his life he has absolutely mastered. It is his only valid status symbol, his equalizer, and he pampers it the same way a busty Hollywood starlet pampers her body. Without it, he is no better than a punk on a street corner. And he knows it. The Angels are not articulate about many things, but they bring a lover’s inspiration to the subject of bikes. Sonny Barger, a man not given to sentimental rambling, once defined the word “love” as “the feelin you get when you like something as much as your motorcycle. Yeah, I guess you could say that was love.”
The fact that many Angels have virtually created their bikes out of stolen, bartered or custom-made parts only half explains the intense attachment they have for them. You’ve got to see an outlaw straddle his hog and start jumping on the starter pedal to fully appreciate what it means. It is like seeing a thirsty man find water. His face changes; his whole bearing radiates confidence and authority. He sits there for a moment with the big machine rumbling between his legs, and then he blasts off…sometimes in a cool, muted kind of way, and sometimes with a roaring wheelstand that rattles nearby windows — but always with style, with élan. And by cutting out in the grand manner at the end of each barroom night, he leaves the others with the best possible image of himself. Each Angel is a mirror in the mutual admiration society. They reflect and reassure each other, in strength and weakness, folly and triumph…and each night at closing time they cut out with a flourish: the juke box wails a Norman Luboff tune, the bar lights dim, and Shane thunders off drunkenly into the moonlight.
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September 5, 2005
Breakfast with Hunter
This Hunter Thompson obsession is almost done with, I swear…just another week, maybe two. I just need to get my momentum back. It’s all a question of the right techniques, the right medicines, the right atmospheric conditions…the time is at hand, but it’s not here quite yet.
In the meantime, I honored the holiday today by having an HST-style breakfast, except without the nudity and the cocaine. In case you’re not familiar with the Doctor’s Philosophy of Breakfast, here it is in a nutshell:
Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner.
I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home — and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed — breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert…. Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music…. All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.
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August 30, 2005
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride (Pt. 1)
So I took a couple of days off to reread Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I lost all my momentum. It’s like Dr. Thompson said to Charles Perry:
I just don’t know what happened, I lost the momentum, it was just like a train on greased rails, I’ve been taking speed to get the momentum back, I haven’t slept in three days, I haven’t changed my clothes, I think my feet are rotting.
Well, it’s sort of like that, except without the speed. I never got into that stuff, thank Jeebus. But I did try to emulate Dr. Thompson in other ways, which was a mistake a lot of us made after reading Fear and Loathing. If ever there were a book that should be emblazoned with the words “Don’t try this at home,” this is it. (Or maybe The 120 Days of Sodom; but you take my point.)
I don’t blame the Doctor for making us want to take drugs, abuse rental cars, and skip out on hotel bills. He never encouraged us to try this stuff, although he did make it seem like so much goddamn fun that it was hard to resist. Every Thompson fan, I’m sure, has a story about some crazy thing they never would have done if they weren’t under the influence of Fear and Loathing.
On the one hand, if he encouraged us to Question Authority a little, so much the better. On the other hand, it was hard to know where to stop. This was true for the Doctor himself as well; when Fear and Loathing became a huge hit, he became a celebrity, but his public image was that of Raoul Duke, his character in the book. And Duke of course was Thompson, but a grotesque and exaggerated version created for literary purposes. People loved this character, this “monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger” who did whatever he wanted and got away with it. And so Dr. Thompson seemed to feel compelled to play this character, at least in public, for the rest of his life.
His friends say that in private he was very different, a gentle and thoughtful man, and I believe it—just like all the wildest comedians turn out to be quiet depressives in real life. You can see a little of this split in the recently released documentary Breakfast with Hunter, for instance in a scene where Thompson is on his way to visit Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone. Off-camera, Thompson has secured a bouquet of flowers for Wenner, of whom he was apparently quite fond. But once the camera is rolling, he exchanges the flowers for a fire extinguisher and blasts Wenner, who tries to be a good sport but is clearly annoyed.
Over time the public Hunter Thompson became a caricature of himself, drunk and mumbling rather than wired and fierce. In Breakfast with Hunter you’d hardly ever know what he’s saying if the filmmaker hadn’t courteously provided subtitles, and he is never seen without a glass of whiskey in his hand. It makes for an interesting comparison with some footage taken over 30 years ago that appears on the bonus disc of the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas movie. In the older film, the Doctor drawls but is comprehensible and articulate—though the whiskey again is omnipresent.
This kind of thing, combined with the Doctor’s suicide, provide ample fodder for those who wish to see his life as a tragedy—The Genius Who Pissed Away His Talent on Booze and Dope. And you can certainly make a case for this viewpoint; for a very well-reasoned and well-written treatment, read this story on popmatters.com. But the truth, I think, is more complicated.
For one thing, however you want to look at it, Hunter Thompson produced more and better work in his life than the rest of us ever will. Sure, his early stuff was better, but isn’t that true of just about every artist—and especially every rock star, which is what Hunter really was? He certainly had enough fun for ten lifetimes. And we have no proof that he killed himself in a moment of alcoholic despair; you can just as well argue that he carefully reasoned out that it was time to go. 67 years is a long time for a guy who never expected to make it to 30.
In Breakfast with Hunter there’s a scene where he pulls out a polaroid of himself sitting alone in a hotel room, and he looks like the saddest and loneliest man on Earth. On the other hand, we also see him working with a couple of editors on a rewrite of The Rum Diary, and he is completely alert and focused, despite taking frequent breaks to pull on his hash pipe.
So I think it’s misguided to view Dr. Thompson as either tragic or heroic. He was a complex human being with a light and a dark side, just like everybody.
But at the same time, there’s no doubt he would have been more productive—and probably happier—had he gotten off the stuff. Apparently he thought about it; in Rolling Stone’s HST memorial issue, Timothy Ferris says,
Hunter occasionally talked to me about stopping drinking. He said that he had thought about joining AA but that you had to admit that you had done something wrong to join AA and he didn’t feel that he had ever done anything wrong.
Loose talk for someone who claimed to understand karma; but it was his life, his karma, his problem. The ones who really suffered were those who tried to imitate the Doctor’s lifestyle and were not blessed with “the constitution of a hammerhead shark.” They were the ones who risked damaging themselves beyond repair.
Again, I don’t feel that Hunter deserves censure for what people did in imitation of him, any more than Al Pacino is responsible for all the idiots who run around thinking they’re Tony Montana, or it’s Lou Reed’s fault if somebody heard “Heroin” and decided to try it. Caveat emptor, for sure. But he himself seemed to feel a sense of responsibility toward his fans. There’s another scene in Breakfast with Hunter where he frets openly about the effect the Fear and Loathing movie is going to have on the public:
Laila Nabulsi: It’s just a movie.
HST: Tell that to the mother of some kid who’s stabbed in the back by some dope fiend out of Vegas, and blames it on this book.
And there’s an especially telling moment earlier in the film, where an earnest young man comes up to him at a bookstore signing, gushing about what a big fan he is and how much he loves Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Hunter’s response is uncharacteristically sober: “Be careful about trying this stuff.”
That’s probably what they should put on the Doctor’s tombstone, if there’s going to be one: “Be careful about trying this stuff.” If Nancy Reagan had half a brain, that would have been her slogan, instead of “Just Say No.” For the curious, the adventurous, and the easily bored, “Just Say No” never cut it; better advice would be “Be careful,” “Call if you need help,” and it never hurts to throw in “I love you.” But that’s another discussion for another time.
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August 22, 2005
Yesterday's Weirdness Is Tomorrow's Reason Why (Part 3)
I was compelled today by Dr. Thompson’s ghost to type in this entire chapter from The Curse of Lono. The Doctor has more and more taken over this blog in the last week because honestly, whose words would I rather type, his or mine? No contest.
No commentary I could add is going to do justice to this passage, which forms the true conclusion of the book (there’s another chapter after it, which could just as well have been left out). Presented in the form of a letter to Ralph Steadman, it wraps up the threads of the Lono business, the City of Refuge, the war club, and all the rest of it with a savage elegance that only Hunter Thompson was capable of.
July 1, 1981
City of Refuge
(24 hours later)…I must be getting old, Ralph, eight pages is about all I can do in one night; so I took a break and got some sleep. I also felt I should back off and have a long look at this I am Lono business, because I am wary of being fooled by another false dawn.
That was the problem, Ralph. We were blind. The story we wanted was right in front of our eyes from the very start — although we can be excused, I think, for our failure to instantly understand a truth beyond reality. It was not an easy thing for me to accept the fact that I was born 1,700 years ago in an ocean-going canoe somewhere off the Kona Coast of Hawaii, a prince of royal Polynesian blood, and lived my first life as King Lono, ruler of all the islands.
According to our missionary/journalist, William Ellis, I “governed Hawaii during what may in its chronology be called the Fabulous Age”…until “(I) became offended with my wife, and murdered her; but afterwards lamented the act so much, as to induce a state of mental derangement. In this state (I) traveled through all the islands, boxing and wrestling with everyone (I) met…(I) subsequently set sail in a singularly shaped ‘magic’ canoe for Tahiti, or a foreign country. After (my) departure (I) was deified by (my) countrymen, and annual games of boxing and wrestling were instituted in (my) honor.”
How’s that for roots?
What?
Don’t argue with me, Ralph. You come from a race of eccentric degenerates; I was promoting my own fights all over Hawaii fifteen hundred years before your people even learned to take a bath.
And besides, this is the story. I don’t know music, but I have a good ear for the high white sound…and when this Lono gig flashed in front of my eyes about 33 hours ago, I knew it for what it was.
Suddenly the whole thing made sense. It was like seeing The Green Light for the first time. I immediately shed all religious and rational constraints, and embraced a New Truth.
It has made my life strange and I was forced to flee the hotel after the realtors hired thugs to finish me off. But they killed a local haole fisherman instead, by mistake. This is true. On the day before I left, thugs beat a local fisherman to death and left him either floating facedown in the harbor, or strangled to death with a brake-cable and left in a jeep on the street in front of the Hotel Manago. News accounts were varied….
That’s when I got scared and took off for The City. I came down the hill at ninety miles an hour and drove the car as far as I could out on the rocks, then I ran like a bastard for the Kaleokeawe — over the fence like a big kangaroo, kick down the door, then crawl inside and start screaming “I am Lono” at my pursuers, a gang of hired thugs and realtors, turned back by native Park Rangers.
They can’t touch me now, Ralph. I am here with a battery-powered typewriter, two blankets from the King Kam, my miner’s headlamp, a kitbag full of speed and other vitals, and my fine Samoan war club. Laila brings me food and whiskey twice a day, and the natives send me women. But they won’t come into the hut — for the same reason nobody else will — so I have to sneak out at night and fuck them out there on the black rocks.
I like it here. It’s not a bad life. I can’t leave, because they’re waiting for me out there by the parking lot, but the natives won’t let them come any closer. They killed me once, and they’re not about to do it again.
Because I am Lono, and as long as I stay in The City those lying swine can’t touch me. I want a telephone installed, but Steve won’t pay the deposit until Laila gives him $600 more for bad drugs.
Which is no problem, Ralph; no problem at all. I’ve already had several offers for my life story, and every night around sundown I crawl out and collect all the joints, coins and other offerings thrown over the stakefence by natives and others of my own kind.
So don’t worry about me, Ralph. I’ve got mine. But I would naturally appreciate a visit, and perhaps a bit of money for the odd expense here and there.
It’s a queer life, for sure, but right now it’s all I have. Last night, around midnight, I heard somebody scratching on the thatch and then a female voice whispered, “You knew it would be like this.”
“That’s right!” I shouted. “I love you!”
There was no reply. Only the sound of this vast and bottomless sea, which talks to me every night and makes me smile in my sleep.
OK
HST
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August 21, 2005
Yesterday's Weirdness Is Tomorrow's Reason Why (Part 2)
Dr. Thompson’s image—his well-deserved and long-cultivated image—as the drug-crazed wildman of American letters tended to obscure what a canny writer he was, at least when he was on top of his game.
Case in point: The Curse of Lono at first seems to be very loosely organized, filled with odd tangents and sidebars on Hawaiian history that at best could be called background, and at worst filler.
So we get the following data on the Hawaiian god Lono, for instance:
King Lono, ruler of all the islands in a time long before the Hawaiians had a written language, was not made in the same mold as Jesus, although he seems to have had the same basically decent instincts. He was a wise ruler and his reign is remembered in legend as a time of peace, happiness and great abundance in the kingdom — the Good Old Days, as it were, before the white man came — which may have something to do with his elevation to the status of a god in the wake of his disappearance.
Lono was also a chronic brawler with an ungovernable temper, a keen eye for the naked side of life and a taste for strong drink at all times.
And a hysterically funny, but not apparently significant incident where the Doctor acquires an ancient Samoan war club:
“What do you have?” I asked him. “I need something to pulverize an aloe plant.”
There was a pause, then he was back on the line.
“I have a fine cutlery set — seventy-seven pieces, with a beautiful butcher knife.”
“I can get that from room service,” I said. “What else do you have?”
There was another long pause. In the background I could hear a woman yelling something about “crazy…” and “chopping our heads off.”
“You’re fired!” he screamed. “I’m tired of your stupid whining. It’s none of your business what they buy. Get out of here! I should have fired you a long time ago.”
There were more sounds of brief scuffling and a babble of angry voices, then he was back.
“I think I have what you need,” he said smoothly. “It’s a carved Samoan war club. Solid ebony, with eight power points. You could pulverize a palm tree with it.”
“How much does it weigh?” I asked….
“It’s very heavy, sir. My scale won’t handle it.” He chuckled. “Yes sir, this thing is heavy. I’d guess about ten pounds. It swings like a sledgehammer. There’s nothing in the world you couldn’t kill with it.”
“What’s the price?” I asked.
“One-fifty.”
“One-fifty?” I said. “For a stick?”
There was no reply for a moment. “No sir,” he said finally. “This thing I have in my hands is not a stick. It’s a Samoan war club, perhaps three hundred years old. It’s also an extremely brutal weapon,” he added. “I could break down your door with it.”
“Never mind that,” I said. “Send it up to the suite immediately.”
This is followed by a section on the Honolulu Marathon (see Part 1) and a lengthy description of a vacation on Kona gone horribly wrong, where Thompson’s “sunny seaside compound” turns out to be a group of shacks lashed day and night by vicious surf. After that the narrative wanders a bit—OK, a lot—dealing with marijuana smuggling, a flea-ridden dog, and high-speed driving on a mountain road before finally getting to the big finish.
Along the way Thompson has befriended a local charter captain, who takes him out to fish for marlin. And they find one…
A terrible blood-lust came on me when I saw him leaping right beside the boat, so close that he almost leaped right into it, and when the captain up on the bridge started screaming “Get the bat! Get the bat! He’s gone wild!” I sprang out of the goddamn fighting chair and, instead of grabbing that silly little aluminum baseball bat they normally use to finish off these bastards with ten or fifteen whacks….
That’s when I reached into my kitbag and brought out the war club and kicked Steve out of the way and then, with a terrible shriek, I hit the beast with a running shot that dropped it back into the water like a stone and caused about sixty seconds of absolute silence in the cockpit.
They weren’t ready for it. The last time anybody killed a big marlin in Hawaii with a short-handled Samoan war club was about three hundred years ago.
And this is where it all starts to coalesce…the business with the war club leads the Doctor to a revelation:
I am Lono.
Yeah, that’s me, Ralph. I am the one they’ve been waiting for all these years. Captain Cook was just another drunken sailor who got lucky in the South Seas….
The trouble began on the day I caught the fish — or, more specifically, it began when I came into the harbor on the flying bridge of the Humdinger and started bellowing at the crowd on the dock about “filthy drunken sons of missionaries” and “lying scum” and “doomed pig-fuckers” and all those other things I mentioned in my last update letter.
What I didn’t tell you, old sport, is that I was also screaming, “I am Lono!” in a thundering voice that could be heard by every Kanaka on the whole waterfront, from the Hilton to the King Kam — and that many of these people were deeply disturbed by the spectacle.
I don’t know what got into me, Ralph — I didn’t mean to say it — at least not that loud, with all those natives listening. Because they are superstitious people, as you know, and they take their legends seriously….
The word traveled swiftly up and down the coast, and by nightfall the downtown streets were crowded with people who had come from as far away as South Point and the Waipio Valley to see for themselves if the rumor really was true — that Lono had, in fact, returned in the form of a huge drunken maniac who dragged fish out of the sea with his bare hands and beat them to death on the dock with a short-handled Samoan war club.
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August 20, 2005
God's Mercy on You Swine
The spirit of Dr. Thompson seems very close at hand tonight, as I sit hunched over this beautiful white machine pushing the buttons and watching letters pop up on the screen. “Sister Morphine” just came on the stereo and the sun has dipped below the trees; a pile of Thompson books, tapes, and clippings sits to my right, topped off by a bottle of Chivas Regal, the Doctor’s whiskey of choice.
By now the Gonzo Cannon has spoken, and the Doctor’s ashes are floating around the air over Woody Creek, but the event seems to have received surprisingly little coverage, at least in this country. The best stories I could find online were from the U.K. paper The Independent and, for some reason, Al-Jazeera.
In poking around I discovered that, contrary to what I’d previously believed, HST did actually leave a suicide note, of sorts: In the kitchen where he shot himself was a typewriter, and in that typewriter a sheet of paper where the Doctor had typed, in the middle of the page, the word “Counselor.”
I read a number of theories as to what this possibly could have meant, but the most provocative was from D.A. Blyler of The Raw Story, who postulates that it is a reference to this passage from the Gospel of John:
And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you.
The biblical connection is especially interesting in light of another key Thompson fact that I belatedly learned this week. I had always assumed that he called himself “Doctor” because he was a self-appointed Doctor of Journalism; turns out that he was the proud owner of a mail-order Doctorate of Divinity, not unlike my own from the Universal Life Church. It figures in the following passage, which is the conclusion of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
I was asleep when our plane hit the runway, but the jolt brought me instantly awake. I looked out the window and saw the Rocky Mountains. What the fuck was I doing here? I wondered. It made no sense at all. I decided to call my attorney as soon as possible. Have him wire me some money to buy a huge albino Doberman. Denver is a national clearing house for stolen Dobermans; they come from all parts of the country.
Since I was already here, I thought I might as well pick up a vicious dog. But first, something for my nerves. Immediately after the plane landed I rushed up the corridor to the airport drugstore and asked the clerk for a box of amyls.
She began to fidget and shake her head. “Oh, no,” she said finally. “I can’t sell those things except by prescription.”
“I know,” I said. “But you see, I’m a doctor. I don’t need a prescription.”
She was still fidgeting. “Well…you’ll have to show me some I.D.,” she moaned.
“Of course,” I jerked out my wallet and let her see the police badge while I flipped through the deck until I located my Ecclesiastical Discount Card - which identifies me as a Doctor of Divinity, a certified Minister of the Church of the New Truth.
She inspected it carefully, then handed it back. I sensed a new respect in her manner. Her eyes grew warm. She seemed to want to touch me. “I hope you’ll forgive me, Doctor,” she said with a fine smile. “But I had to ask. We get some real freaks in this place. All kinds of dangerous addicts. You’d never believe it.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I understand perfectly. But I have a bad heart and I hope -“
“Certainly!” she exclaimed - and within seconds she was back with a dozen amyls. I paid without quibbling about the ecclesiastical discount. Then I opened the box and cracked one under my nose immediately, while she watched.
“Just be thankful your heart is young and strong,” I said. “If I were you I would never…ah…holy shit!…what? Yes, you’ll have to excuse me now; I feel it coming on.” I turned away and reeled off in the general direction of the bar.
“God’s mercy on you swine!” I shouted at two marines coming out of the men’s room.
They looked at me, but said nothing. By this time I was laughing crazily. But it made no difference. I was just another fucked-up cleric with a bad heart. Shit, they’ll love me down at the Brown Palace. I took another big hit off the amyl, and by the time I got to the bar my heart was full of joy. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger…a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.
Yes, Hunter Thompson was definitely a holy man of some sort…or maybe an incarnation of a minor deity, the god of mind-bending and Bad Craziness. More on that later…in the meantime, Saturday night beckons. God’s mercy on you swine.
Posted by bill at 6:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 19, 2005
Yesterday's Weirdness Is Tomorrow's Reason Why (Part 1)
One of Ralph Steadman’s illustrations for The Curse of Lono.
Dr. Thompson’s most criminally underappreciated book is The Curse of Lono, which was published in 1983 (not, as I said yesterday, in 1980—though it was almost entirely written in 1980, so I’m not docking myself any points for the error). For my money, this was the Doctor’s last substantial work of genius—although, having bypassed some of the later books, I could end up having to revise that opinion at some point in the future.
Like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Curse of Lono begins with Thompson accepting a magazine assignment to cover a sporting event, in this case the 1980 Honolulu Marathon. The Marathon ends up as one chapter in the book, albeit a quite interesting and thoughtful one, with the Doctor offering his unique insights into the sport of running:
Marathon running, like golf, is a game for players, not winners. That is why Wilson sells golf clubs, and Nike sells running shoes. The Eighties will not be a healthy decade for games designed only for winners — except at the very pinnacle of professional sport; like the Super Bowl, or the Heavyweight Championship of the World. The rest of us will have to adjust to this notion, or go mad from losing. Some people will argue, but not many. The concept of victory through defeat has already taken root, and a lot of people say it makes sense. The Honolulu Marathon was a showcase example of the New Ethic. The main prize in this race was a gray T-shirt for every one of the four thousand “Finishers.” That was the test, and the only ones who failed were those who dropped out.
There was no special shirt for the winner, who finished so far ahead of the others that only a handful of them ever saw him until the race was long over…and not one of them was ever close enough to [Duncan] McDonald, in those last two miles before the finish, to see how a real winner runs.
The other five or six or seven or eight thousand entrants were running for their own reasons…and this is the angle we need, the raison d’etre as it were….Why do these buggers run? Why do they punish themselves so brutally, for no prize at all? What kind of sick instinct would cause eight thousand supposedly smart people to get up at four in the morning and stagger at high speed through the streets of Waikiki for 26 ball-busting miles in a race that less than a dozen of them have the slightest chance of winning?
These’s no sane reason at all for these runners. Only a fool would try to explain why four thousand Japanese ran at top speed past the USS Arizona, sunken memorial in the middle of Pearl Harbor, along with another four or five thousand certified American liberals cranked up on beer and spaghetti and all taking the whole thing so seriously that only one in two thousand could even smile at the idea of a 26-mile race featuring four thousand Japanese that begins and ends within a stone’s throw of Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1980….
Thirty-nine years later. What are these people celebrating? And why on this bloodstained anniversary?
It was a weird gig in Honolulu, and it is ever weirder now. We are talking, here, about a thing with more weight than we know. What looked like a paid vacation in Hawaii has turned into a nightmare - and at least one person has suggested that we may be looking at the Last Refuge of the Liberal Mind, or at least the last thing that Works.
Run for your life, sport, because that’s all you have left. The same people who burned their draft cards in the Sixties and got lost in the Seventies are now into running. When politics failed and personal relationships proved unmanageable; after McGovern went down and Nixon exploded right in front of our eyes…after Ted Kennedy got Stassenized and Jimmy Carter put the fork to everybody who ever believed anything he said about anything at all, and after the nation turned en masse to the atavistic wisdom of Ronald Reagan.
Well, these are, after all, the Eighties and the time has finally come to see who has teeth, and who doesn’t…. Which may or may not account for the odd spectacle of two generations of political activists and social anarchists finally turning - twenty years later - into runners.
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August 18, 2005
Generation of Swine
The 80s were not a good decade for the Doctor. In 1980 he saw his personally anointed president, Jimmy Carter, soundly thrashed by the hated Ronald Reagan. And not just beaten but roundly denounced as a failure, a weakling, and worst of all, a bummer.
America, it seemed, was tired of hearing the bad news, however truthful. People preferred Reagan’s fantasy world, where you can cut taxes and increase spending without repercussions. Even so, Carter might well have been reelected had he been able to get the hostages out of Iran; that was what really sealed his fate. Of course we know now that Reagan’s campaign made a secret deal with the government of Iran to keep the hostages until after the election, which is technically treason, but that is a topic for another time.
The point is, after The Curse of Lono was published in 1980, we didn’t hear much from Hunter Thompson for a few years, and he never seemed quite the same afterward. Like most confirmed cynics, Thompson was a romantic at heart, and I think he really allowed himself to believe in Jimmy Carter, or rather what he thought Carter represented for America: honesty, integrity, and willingness to do things the right way, even if it’s more difficult.
It would be easy to get into a long argument about Carter’s effectiveness as president, but there’s no question that the country gave up on his way of doing things pretty quickly, and jumped on Reagan’s bandwagon with a vengeance. This was hard for a lot of people to swallow, and harder for Hunter Thompson than most.
When Thompson reappeared as the author of a weekly San Francisco Examiner column in the late 80s, the sense of hope that had counterbalanced his cynicism was gone, and he became a straight-up prophet of doom and malice who ranted about a “generation of swine.” Which was what the times called for, no doubt; but it can’t be healthy for you, and neither can staying continuously loaded for 20 years, which is what he was working on at the time.
Maybe it was the booze and the drugs; maybe it was because he’d given up hope; or maybe they’re two sides of the same coin — for whatever reason, the Doctor’s productivity had declined over the years. He went from being a guy who produced a 500-page book on the 1972 election to one who struggled to produce a thousand words once a week (many tales are told of his deadline battles with editors at the Examiner, whom the Doctor put through hell on a weekly basis).
But again, the talent was always there, and every so often it would make itself heard, as in this 1988 column (which is collected in the book Generation of Swine). Here the Doctor wields sarcasm like a knife aimed squarely at the heart of George Bush the Elder — though it’s every bit as funny, and more relevant, if you picture George W. instead.
The Other George Bush
By Hunter S. Thompson
Skinner called from Washington last week and warned me that I was dangerously wrong and ignorant about George Bush. “I know you won’t want to hear this,” he said, “but George is an utterly different person from the one he appears to be — from the one you’ve been whipping on, for that matter. I thought you should know….”
I put him on hold and said I would call him back after the Kentucky-Maryland game. I had given 5 points, and Kentucky was ahead by 7 with 18 seconds to go…. George Bush meant nothing to me, at that moment. The whole campaign was like the sound of some radio far up the street.
But Skinner persisted, for some reason…. He was trying to tell me something. He was saying that Bush was not what he seemed to be — that somewhere inside him were the seeds of a genuine philosopher king.
“He is smarter than Thomas Jefferson,” Skinner said. “He has the potential to stand taller in history than both of the Roosevelts put together.”
I was shocked. “You lying swine,” I said. “Who paid you to say these things? Why are you calling me?”
“It’s for your own good,” he said. “I’m just trying to help you.”…He took a call on one of his other lines, then came back to me in a blaze of disconnected gibberish.
“Listen to me,” he was saying. “I was with him last night, all alone. We sat in front of his fireplace and burned big logs and listened to music and drank whiskey and he got a little weepy, but I told him not to worry about it, and he said he was the only living voice of Bobby Kennedy in American politics today.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t tell me that swill. It’s too horrible. I depend on you for more than that.”
I laughed. It was crazy. Here was Gene Skinner — one of the meanest and most cynical hit men in politics — telling me that he’d spent the last two nights arguing with George Bush about the true meaning of Plato’s Republic and the Parable of the Caves, smoking Djarum cigarettes and weeping distractedly while they kept playing and replaying old Leonard Cohen tunes on his old Nakamichi tape machine.
“Yeah,” Skinner said, “he still carries that 350 with the Halliburton case, the one he’s carried for years…He loves music, realy high rock’n’roll. He has tapes of Alice Stuart that he made himself on the Nak.”
Ye Gods, I thought. They’ve finally turned him; he’s gone belly-up. How did he get my phone number?
“You hideous punk! Don’t call me any more!” I yelled at him. “I’m moving to Hawaii next week. I know where you’ve been for the last two years. Stay away from me!”
“You fool!” he shouted. “Where were you when we were looking for you in New Orleans last week? We hung around for three days. George wanted to hook up with the Neville Brothers. We were traveling incognito.” …and now he was telling me that Bush — half mad on cheap gin and hubris, with 16 states already locked up on Super Tuesday — showed up at the New Orleans airport on Sunday night with only one bodyguard and a black 928 Porsche with smoked windows and Argentine license plates.
It was hard to accept. Skinner was a professional, I knew — and Bush was a former director of the CIA. It was a strange mix; and especially strange, given Skinner’s bizarre fix on Bush, which made me very uneasy.
“You know why he likes me?” he said. “He likes me because I know poems. He loves poetry. He can do ‘Annabel Lee’ from top to bottom.” At that point his voice got blurry:
“It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea….” He paused for a minute, then went on in a dreamy voice, which disturbed me. “And this maiden she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me…. I was a child and she was a child in this kingdom by the sea. But we loved with a love that was more than love—”
“That’s enough,” I said. “I can’t stand it. The idea of George Bush cruising around New Orleans and quoting the works of Edgar Allan Poe is more than I can handle.”
“That’s nothing,” Skinner replied. “He can sing every song that Bob Dylan ever wrote. He plays the Dobro. He has the second Dobro ever made — in its original case. Incredible, incredible.”
I laughed harshly, but he seemed not to notice.
“And he loves animals,” Skinner said. “Animals are the only thing he loves more than music.”
“I saw him rescue a dead cat and try to bring it back to life,” he said, “right out in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. He put his head right down on that animal’s lips and blew his own breath down its throat…. People hooted and cheered at him and a big crowd gathered, but he kept right on.”
I felt sick and said nothing. Skinner rambled on, drifted from one demented story to another, like he was talking about the Maharishi. It made no sense at all.
None of it did, for that matter. George Bush was a mean crook from Texas. He had no friends and nobody in Washington wanted to be seen with him on the streets at night. There was something queasy about him, they said - a sense of something grown back into itself, like a dead animal…. It was impossible that he could be roaming around Washington or New Orleans at night, jabbering about Dylan Thomas and picking up dead cats.
There was something very wrong about it, deeply wrong, even queer…. Yet Skinner seemed to believe these things, and he wanted me to believe them.
Why? It was like hearing that Ivan Boesky had written “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” or that Ed Meese wakes up every morning and hurls a $100 bill across the Potomac.
I hung up the phone and felt crazy. Then I walked back to the hotel in the rain.
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August 17, 2005
Electricity Wants to Go Home
I can’t say too much about Dr. Thompson’s work over the last 15 years, because I stopped buying his books after shelling out $21.95 for Songs of the Doomed — which was awfully pricy for a book back in 1990, especially when you’re fresh out of college. I was not too happy to get home and discover that it consisted mostly of retreads from Hell’s Angels and The Great Shark Hunt, Examiner columns that hadn’t made it into Generation of Swine, and unpublished fiction that would have been better left unpublished. It seemed likely that the Doctor was going through one of his drunker phases, and his editors had thrown the book together from whatever they had at hand.
But even there, the real thing, the genius, would pop up once in a while. As in the short piece called “Electricity,” which you can hear here in the Doctor’s own voice:
Although given how much the Doctor mumbles, you’re probably going to want a transcript.
Electricity
By Hunter S. Thompson
They laughed at Thomas Edison.
It has been raining a lot recently. Quick thunderstorms and flash floods…lightning at night and fear in the afternoon. People are worried about electricity.
Nobody feels safe. Fires burst out on dry hillsides, raging out of control, while dope fiends dance in the rancid smoke and animals gnaw each other. Foreigners are everywhere, carrying pistols and bags of money. There are rumors about murder and treachery and women with no pulse. Crime is rampant and even children are losing their will to live.
The phones go dead and power lines collapse, whole families plunged into darkness with no warning at all. People who used to be in charge walk around wall-eyed, with their hair standing straight up on end looking like they work for Don King, and babbling distractedly about their hearts humming like stun guns and trying to leap out of their bodies like animals trapped in bags.
People get very conscious of electricity when it goes sideways and starts to act erratic…eerie blackouts, hissing, and strange shocks from the toilet bowl, terrifying power surges that make light bulbs explode and fry computer circuits that are not even plugged in…The air crackles around your head and you take a jolt every time you touch yourself. Your lawyer burns all the hair off his body when he picks up the cordless phone to dial 911.
Nobody can handle electricity run amok. It is too powerful…Ben Franklin was never able to lock a door again after the day lightning came down his kite string and fused that key to his thumb. They called it a great discovery and they called him a great scientist; but, in fact, he bawled like a baby for the rest of his life every time he smelled rain in the air.
I find myself jerking instinctively into the classic self-defense stance of a professional wire wizard every time I hear rain on the roof. That is an atavistic tic that I picked up many years ago in my all-night advanced intelligence electronics class at Scott AFB, on the outskirts of east St. Louis — where I also learned about pawnshops, oscillators, and full-bore lying as a natural way of life.
The stance was the first thing we learned, and we learned it again every day for a long, crazy year. It is as basic to working with serious electricity as holding your breath is to working underwater….
Lock one hand behind your back before you touch anything full of dissatisfied voltage — even a failed light bulb — because you will almost certainly die soon if you don’t.
Electricity is neutral. It doesn’t want to kill you, but it will if you give it a chance. Electricity wants to go home, and to find a quick way to get there — and it will.
Electricity is always homesick. It is lonely. But it is also lazy. It is like a hillbilly with a shotgun and a jug of whiskey gone mad for revenge on some enemy — a fatal attraction, for sure - but he won’t go much out of his way to chase the bugger down if ambush looks a lot easier.
Why prowl around and make a spectacle of yourself when you can lay in wait under some darkened bridge and swill whiskey like a troll full of hate until your victim appears — drunk and careless and right on schedule — so close that you almost feel embarrassed about pulling the trigger.
That is how electricity likes to work. It has no feelings except loneliness, laziness, and a hatred of anything that acts like resistance…like a wharf rat with its back to the wall — it won’t fight unless it has to, but then it will fight to the death.
Electricity is the same way: it will kill anything that gets in its way once it thinks it sees a way to get home quick….
Zaaappp!
Right straight up your finger and through your heart and your chest cavity and down the other side.
Anything that gives it an escape route. Anything — iron, wire, water, flesh, ganglia — that will take it where it must go, with the efficiency of gravity or the imperative of salmon swimming upriver…. And it wants the shortest route — which is not around a corner and through a muscle mass in the middle of your back, but it will go that way if it has to.
Some people had to have their loose hand strapped behind them in a hammerlock with rubber cords, just to keep their hearts from exploding and their neck nerves from being fried like long blond hairs in a meat fire when the voltage went through. But sooner or later they learned. We all did, one way or another.
One night — perhaps out of boredom or some restless angst about the fate of Caryl Chessman or maybe Christine Keeler — I connected a 50,000-volt RF transformer to one end of the thin aluminum strap on the Formica workbench that ran around three sides of the big classroom; and then I grounded the strap to a deep-set screw in a wall socket.
Severe shocks resulted when the generator jumped its limiter and began cranking out massive jolts and surges of RF voltage. A 50,000-volt shock ran through my stomach, just below my navel, burning a long, thin hole that I can still pull a string of dental floss through on wet nights.
It was horrible, and still is, but it was also a massive breakthrough; and I will never forget the warped joy I felt when the first surge of electricity went through them. They squawked at each other and flapped their arms like chickens….
My own pain was nothing compared to the elation of knowing that I had just made an unspeakably powerful new friend — an invisble weapon that could turn warriors and wizards into newts, and cause them to weep.
Washington, DC, 1989
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