Hunter S. Thompson: 1937-2005
by David Essex

In 1971, like many people, I was dazzled by what I thought was my first glimpse of a new writer's work in Rolling Stone, as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" was serialized in those then-newsprint pages. Being about as experimental as was then fashionable I was immediately sucked in by the piece's hilarious, kaleidoscopic, drug-crazed quest. Only toward the end of the story, when the bylined narrator, Raoul Duke, denies being the "Hunter Thompson" in the photograph a casino detective shows him, did I get it — Raoul Duke was the same guy who'd written "Hell's Angels," a book that had warped my impressionable imagination in junior high. I turned everybody in my circle on to it, and soon we were quoting it back and forth to each other, the sacred text of many bongathons.

Twenty years later, when I assigned "Fear and Loathing" to my Contemporary Lit class, I was surprised to find that the work had lost little of its impact, though its context — Vietnam, Nixon and the heyday of LSD — had passed into near oblivion. One thing many dazzled students wanted to know about the drug-fueled journey to the nuke-glassed heart of the American dream, was, "Is it fact or fiction?"

Oscar Zeta-Acosta, "Dr. Gonzo" in the book, was said to have declared, "It's true, it's all too true," after its publication. He also was said to have testily demanded a cut of the profits, as true author of a fair amount of its incident and dialogue. But of course there's no way it could all be factual; instead it captures the surreal truth of its time in the mode of hallucination, as Joyce had done in the Night Town episode of "Ulysses." Appropriately, "Finnegan's Wake" might provide the recipe for the so-called "Gonzo journalism" Thompson had witched into: "Putting truth and untruth together, a shot may be made at what this hybrid was actually like to look at...."

In truth, a lot of people already had been practicing something like the sort of participatory journalism Hunter Thompson reveled in. He'd actually ridden with the Angels in pursuit of his story, and they stomped him nearly flat before he got to write it. But even before that, Tom Wolfe had eschewed objectivity, in order to get a more rounded story, though his immersion was never total. (Wolfe's "Electric Kool Aid Acid Test" and Thompson's "Hell's Angels" both describe a party Ken Kesey once threw in the mountains of California — the two accounts provide a classic Rashomon divergence in perspective.)

George Plimpton dabbled at many things — quarterbacking, prize-fighting and playing the triangle with a symphony orchestra, to urbanely limn their contours. And just a year-and-a-half before Thompson went to Las Vegas, a fellow passenger on a trans-Pacific flight remarked to a weary correspondent returning from Vietnam, "Must be hard to stay objective." "Impossible," Michael Herr responded — so impossible it would take him seven more years to write the second great work of Gonzo genius, the best book about that war, "Dispatches."

Thompson produced "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" in "a long fine flash of inspiration" and less than a year after the events it's based on. But it is a truly great book, like "Dispatches," like "The Great Gatsby," the kind of towering achievement that may cause their authors to despair of ever reaching those heights again. Thompson went on to make many smaller contributions to American letters, and to the political discourse. His dispatches from the campaign trail, his cogent observations on American life, sport and media filled fine books, but he never repeated the sustained brilliance of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

This may have had something to do with his legendary drug intake. Sometimes he simply opted for the buzz and never filed the story. Plimpton roomed with Thompson when they were both covering the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle. The fight was postponed when Foreman injured his hand, and in the ensuing weeks Thompson laid into a kilo brick of hashish and decided it just wasn't his sort of story anymore. Plimpton recalled that when he left for ring-side, "I found Hunter in the very scummy hotel pool, in one of those floating chairs, loading and reloading the hash pipe. He would not be stirred. I went on alone."

Today, the executives of the so-called mainstream media assume their product should be at least marketed as "fair and balanced." Thus, their very dependable and professional "journalists" get partisans of the first party to say, "The world is flat," and partisans of the second party to say, "The world is round," and then sum up with the notion that truth lies somewhere in between. But Thompson knew, from going to the edge to get it, that sometimes the truth is best expressed in obscenity, and at others times it can only be approached through the fantastic. His words should be engraved above the entrance to every school of journalism: "Some people will say that words like 'scum' and 'rotten' are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place."

Journalism has now lapsed into a mode psychiatrists call "negative hallucination" — that isn't a bad trip, it's a pathological refusal to see what's plainly there. Thompson couldn't go that way; nor did he see any need to sound balanced. About the latest administration to slither in, he wrote this, "Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads...? They are the racists and hate mongers among us — they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis."

But Thompson realized that his views and his way of making his points were increasingly marginalized, in our time of eternal war, when the president's lackeys tell can the people to "watch what they say" and pay no political penalty. He went out to the Nevada desert looking for the American Dream in "the foul year of Our Lord, 1970" and lately didn't seem to think the next 35 had been any fairer. Many of his admirers are surprised that he lasted this long.

E-mail David Essex at djessex@earthlink.net.

— graphic by Pete Wagner(wag@mn.rr.com)