Hunter S. Thompson — He Dead

Of the so-called New Journalists thus far I have written about Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, and just a little about Tom Wolfe (more on him to follow). My wife is the in-house expert on, and advocate for Joan Didion, though I’ve read and enjoyed a couple of her books. But we have neglected Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005), a wrong that must be redressed. This year seems a good time, since we’re at 20 years since we lost him, and 60 years since he began reporting on The Hell’s Angels, which is what put him on the map. (The title of this post is adapted from Thompson’s chapbook marking the passing of Timothy Leary).

I’m sure I’m not alone in having been most engrossed in Thompson’s writing when I was in my late teens and early twenties, no doubt spurred on by the then-obscure bio-pic Where the Buffalo Roam (1979) starring Bill Murray. I was unaware of that film when it was originally released, at a time when I was in my early teens. But somehow we came across it in the early days of home video, my friends and I, and screened it several times, because that is the age (19, 20) when you glamorize non-stop partying to the maximum. And naturally, we loved his writing, which was funny, honest, true, and joyously unencumbered by adherence to convention.

I’ve been trying to get a bead on what in particular I respond to about him, Because there are aspects of his personality that are not my thing at all, the machismo, the devotion to sports and firearms. Violence and property damage. They don’t bother me so much when grappling with them as aspects of a carefully-wrought public character, from a distance, as an abstraction, but I’m sure I wouldn’t actually want to hang out with him for more than five minutes unless he spiked my Kool-Aid. He could also be guilty of homophobia, and sexism.

So what do I like and respond to in his writing, apart from the intoxicating, hyperbolic prose itself? The bottom line seems to be an across the board anti-authoritarianism. When he was a teenager Thompson did a month in jail and was unable to finish high school for having been with another kid who stole a car. This has to have been a formative experience for him. And, as someone with a Southern father, I know what the social structures down there are like (Thompson grew up in Louisville). They are ancient. It’s not authority per se that one objects to, it’s excessive, arbitrary, and cruel authority. Injustice, and meanness for its own sake. I don’t know what Thompson’s father was like, and at any rate he died when the boy was 14, so it could well have been the sudden ABSENCE of authority that made Thompson start to act out (said the armchair psychotherapist). But we do know that he developed a kind of knee-jerk resistance to anyone who presumed to lord it over him, even in the smallest way. He was let out of the Air Force early on that score. He lost jobs. He ran afoul of all his editors and publishers and of course the law itself.

What’s the line between a criminal and an anarchist? Is there any? Thompson expressed admiration for figures on the left, like the Wobblies and Che Guavara. But I think we all know he wouldn’t have lasted two seconds under left-wing authority any more than right-wing authority. Do we really think a socialist government would let him have GUNS? All the guns he wanted? Reckless gunplay on his property with nothing more than an eye-wink from a judge? No way in hell! Basically, Thompson was just in that old-fashioned American tradition of being a guy who hates neckties and bosses and the conformist expectations of his next door neighbor. And his natural tendencies were given further fuel by the times and places in which he lived.

In his youth he aspired to be the Great American Writer, and studied Hemingway and Fitzgerald with that end in mind. In 1960, he went to Puerto Rico to be a sports reporter, but wound up working as a stringer for the local bureaus of major papers. The experience became his early novel The Rum Diary, which went unpublished until 1998, and became a 2011 film starring Johnny Depp. He also worked throughout South America covering stories for the National Observer and the Brazil Herald. During this period he began taking speed, amphetamines, to enhance his writing. In 1964, he went to Ketchum, Idaho to do a piece on Hemingway’s suicide, and walked out of his house with a pair of stolen elk antlers.

It seems pretty clear that his arrival in California is truly what made him who he was. He lived in Big Sur for a time as caretaker and security guard at what became the Esalen Institute. He wrote a piece about the bohemian culture of the region, and was clearly influenced by it. In San Francisco he covered the first of many national political conventions, the 1964 GOP one that nominated Barry Goldwater. He wrote a review of Tom Wolfe’s 1965 The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, which surely had to have been influential upon him. And then he began a series of articles based on his experiences living among the Hell’s Angels in Haight-Ashbury, which became his first book Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966). This was at a time when the biker gangs were on the ascendant. AIP began celebrating them in a series of films at around this time, as well. The book was a major hit and put Thompson on the map. He used the proceeds to buy his legendary house and property outside Aspen, which he dubbed “Owl Farm”, and referred to, with justification as his “fortified compound”.

In 1967 he wrote an article called “The ‘Hashbury’ is the Capital of the Hippies” for The New York Times. In 1968 he covered the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as part of a planned book project called The Joint Chiefs. The violence there radicalized him. He became a tax resister over the Vietnam War. A planned book about Lyndon Johnson was aborted after the President pulled out of the 1968 election. In 1969 he began writing regularly for Rolling Stone magazine, which was then just over a year old. There was a synchronicity there. Rolling Stone was ostensibly a rock and roll publication. Thompson brought something of the reckless, wild spontaneity and outlandishness of rock and roll to his writing. The title of “Dr.” which he began using at around this time was bestowed by an outfit known as The Church of The New Truth.

In 1970, clearly inspired by the Yippies, Thompson ran to be the sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado (where Aspen is), on the Freak Power ticket, with a platform of drug decriminalization, among other things. He lost, of course, but the episode was immortalized in his Rolling Stone article “The Battle of Aspen” and the 2020 film Freak Power: The Ballot or the Bomb. That same year he wrote his seminal piece “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” which contrasted the titular event with rants about his bete noir Richard Nixon, the Kent State Massacre, and other atrocities of the day. This is the piece where his patented style began to solidify, mixing reportage with first person testimony and commentary and stretches of complete fantasy. It became known as Gonzo Journalism. The Kentucky Derby piece is also when he began working with illustrator Ralph Steadman, as he regularly did going forward.

Next came the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), which grew out of an episode wherein Thompson and his friend Mexican-American attorney Oscar Acosta painted the town psychedelic red while Thompson was ostensibly covering a motorcycle race for Sports Illustrated and writing a piece about the death of an activist called “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan”. The book, which was vastly less straight than the Hell’s Angels book had been, threaded a needle that entwined the drugged-fueled exploits of the two men, contrasted with an equally hallucinatory portrait of the garish and tasteless Sin City. The book was a bestseller, and made Thompson a mainstream figure, at least among the book-reading public. This book was followed by the politically perceptive Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, considered his career high water mark.

After this, the results were more mixed. Many blame the fact that he developed a cocaine habit in 1973 (seemingly replacing speed) for his inability to write with any discipline going forward. (For those who are strangers to writing: you do actually have to sit down and think and make marks on a paper for long hours in order to get the work done. Whereas cocaine makes you want to, um, dance, climb the walls, swing from the chandeliers). I also note a few other things that might have broken his streak. America’s involvement in Vietnam ended in 1973. Richard Nixon resigned in 1974. (Perhaps less relevant, but possibly a minor factor: Acosta went missing in Mexico in 1974 and was never seen again). While Thompson did most certainly write and publish additional works after this, there were other assignments that were not completed. In some cases, he didn’t write the pieces for his assignments until decades had passed.

He went to Zaire to cover The Rumble in the Jungle (the 1974 Ali–Foreman boxing match) but got too drunk to attend the bout. He went to cover the Fall of Saigon in 1975. He turned the story in a decade later. He did manage to write a 10,000 word article about Jimmy Carter’s Presidential campaign, though a planned book on that year’s election did not come to fruition. He covered the U.S. Invasion of Grenada in 1983. That piece didn’t emerge until two decades later. Meanwhile, Thompson was becoming immortalized in other ways. In 1974, Garry Trudeau introduced the character of Zonker’s Uncle Duke (a thinly veiled Thompson stand-in) in Doonesbury. There was a 1978 BBC documentary called Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision. In 1979, the aforementioned movie Where the Buffalo Roam.

With the exception of The Curse of Lono (1983), about a Hawaiian footrace, most of his subsequent books were to some extent collections and repackagings of his precious writings. Granted, there were many of them, and they sold very well. He did continue turn out additional articles and columns, and a couple of unpublished novels over the years. And of course Terry Gilliam’s movie version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) starring Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro brought in lots of income and renewed attention.

But by early 2005, Thompson was aging (67 years old) and suffered from depression. What’s an angry, alcoholic, macho old dude do when his body is failing and (as he titled his suicide note), “Football season is over”? Not for the first time, the answer came from Hemingway. And the gunplay extended even after his passing. Per his request, his ashes were shot out of a cannon.