Dr. Gonzo Rides Again: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Turns 50
Or the Confessions and Errors of a Dumb Young Man
Hunter S. Thompson in Las Vegas, 1971
Highway madness, the cult of personality and the evasive American Dream, all blended together into a cocktail of decadence, served up on a platter covered in thumb prints etched in cocaine residue. The crumbling promises of the 1960s counterculture movement, summed up by writer Hunter S. Thompson’s magnum opus, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, turns fifty years old this month. Subtitled “a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream,” visions and comparisons to journeying to the center of the earth — or Hell itself — are immediate, practical and deliberate. To confront the great beast, one must be prepared to damage himself in the heroic endeavor. This was the spirit that flew east of Barstow via a fire apple red convertible on a head full of acid, towing a trunk full of narcotics and a sidekick carrying a Bowie knife tucked in his briefs for good measure. The Mission: find out what happened to the promised utopia. Where had it gone off to? Who had done it wrong? Had it been caged in some back alley harem? Or was it in plain sight for everyone to miss, an illusion that captivated millions of gullible believers with a fantasy of consumerism and entertainment being the main attractions? Surely, Las Vegas had the answers for these two wild animals seeking twisted escapism.
It was March 1971 and writer Hunter S. Thompson, along with Chicano lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta, decided to break out of Los Angeles and spend a week in Vegas to appease Thompson’s coverage of the Mint 400 motocross race for Sports Illustrated. In truth, they were together to discuss the recent death of Chicano activist Ruben Salazar at the hands of the LAPD, and fearing they were being spied on the two rented a convertible and hit the desert to mull things over. What followed remains hotly debated among followers and professionals alike. Did the two really do what the book proclaims? Was there really a suitcase full of every narcotic known to man tucked into the trunk? For a better rundown of this theme, I’ll send you to David S. Wills’ timely essay at Quillette, published as I was editing this piece. For the Hollywood treatment, there’s always the 1998 Terry Gilliam film starring Johnny Depp as Thompson’s alter-ego, Raoul Duke, and Benicio del Toro as the madcap Dr. Gonzo. Critics panned the film as unwatchable, seemingly echoing earlier critics of the book that watching two guys stoned out of their minds acting like goons was stupid and not worthy of anyone’s time. What the critics were once again missing was the whole point of the story: it’s deliberate middle finger to law, order and perceptions of established authority. Was that what ‘searching for the American dream’ was all about? It’s hard to know at face value. The film, approved by Thompson — who became exceptionally close with Depp in real life — added the impossible for many: a visual interpretation of the book’s drug-binging lunacy. It’s no wonder that Thompson proudly said the film portrayed everything “as I remembered it.” What was fact and what was fiction did not matter in his world, one he had created decades ago and whose contribution to the American zeitgeist, for good and for bad, had enshrined the blurring of fantasy and reality to tell a good story.
In 1970, Thompson wrote a piece for the New Left rag Scanlan’s Monthly where he covered the Kentucky Derby in his hometown of Louisville. It would be the first piece where the decadence of American society, a theme he had sought to underpin with his book on the Hell’s Angels, was presented as a character in the story itself, a caricature of the ‘wholesome’ Americana spoon fed to us from birth. The people who claimed to have it together were actually no better — and in fact worse in many respects — than the down trodden, salt-of-the-earth types often billed as the saps and losers in high-brow media. To combat this form of voyeurism, Thompson inserted himself into the story and became the narrator by default, someone thrusted into a situation against their will and forced to record what they saw. This was the birth of gonzo journalism, regularly imitated and rarely successful.
His modern invention of blurring the lines between fact and fiction earned him the badge of de facto literary poet to the counterculture movement, but it had the untended consequence of warping admirers and critics alike into writing his style. It’s not very difficult to see a line from his peak output of the 1970s to where much of what passes for ‘journalism’ today relies heavily on subjective emotion over objective reporting and truth. Writers, often aware of their powers, have a tendency to inject too much of themselves in their own stories. For fiction, this is a necessity. For non-fiction, it comes off as self-serving and cheap. It’s a tightrope that only the best of writers can safely navigate. Very few are of that caliber, historically. Thompson managed the balance for most of his career because he was of that caliber of writer, and it earned him fame among the counterculture circles.
It’s not surprising that his ‘anti-hero’ took off at a time when challenging the establishment had gained currency in the culture. Among many ways this morphed into the post-60s retrospectives, Thompson tapped into the emerging theme of ‘snobs vs. slobs’ that saw airplay in classic films like Animal House, Caddyshack and Stripes, all products of the same counterculture circles: Rolling Stone, Playboy and National Lampoon served as gatekeepers for the literary voices and Saturday Night Live became the television face to the Baby Boomer-led assault by using humor, satire, and political criticism to take on the establishment.
All of this in reaction to what to make of the 1970s, the era of assessing the failures of Vietnam, Nixon, and yes, the 1960s counterculture movement. Thompson became its literary champion, or as fellow traveler Tom Wolfe once said of him, “He’s the Mark Twain of the 20th Century.” Quite the compliment and bar to live up to.
There was, however, a cost to his success. What made him a particularly lethal writer was his ability to blend in with the people and events he was covering. After Fear and Loathing made him a counterculture star, akin to a rock star in the stuffy political elite circles, ambiguity was lost forever. Soon, the politicians he was covering wanted to meet him over a round of drinks. He had become famous, much to his own detriment of wanting to do serious work as a writer. So, he gradually began adopting this image of an unpredictable wild man who wrote scathing pieces in Rolling Stone magazine. No longer able to keep gonzo contained to his stories, fiction began seeping into real life. A reputation of his own creation. During interviews he was never quite sure what the public wanted from him: the character of Duke or the real Thompson. He gradually succumbed to playing the character the public wanted and expected. He turned to drugs and alcohol more in the post-Vegas years. The chain-smoking, bourbon guzzling peacock strutted in front of his audiences to thunderous applause. The wit was still there. The eye for seeing through manufactured bullshit ever ready to pounce. But the focus waned and the talent wasted. Good work became sporadic, excellent work even rarer. The myth had replaced the man in real time, and despite his continued appeal (he did help elect Bill Clinton in 1992) and ability of sharp criticism to current affairs, it was as if everyone, including Thompson, became content with riding on the cultural upheaval Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas had achieved in 1972.
“The Edge...There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others-the living-are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there.” - Hell’s Angels, 1966.
I recall writing about the impending Iraq War in March 2003. Still under the guise of ignorance brought on by inexperienced thinking, I penned a lengthy unpublished essay about why toppling Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do. My misplaced sense of patriotism soon waned with the infamous ‘Mission Accomplished’ presser aboard the aircraft carrier, and I never again trusted the government. A wise decision brought on by a lesson in humility. But that humility was reinforced by reading Hunter Thompson, himself a rabid critic of the government. Though I had read and been exposed to Salinger, Orwell and Lee, his prose was something different. It demanded a certain strain of you come undone in order to properly handle what you were about to put yourself through. I was smitten by its brutal honesty. So I tried my best to emulate gonzo. Writing became an unraveling of the mind and spirit, one fueled by a quest to unlock that inner logic and tap into a line of thinking that mortals couldn’t access, or whatever that is supposed to mean. The 2am punching of the fingers is typical among writers, grad students and meth fiends; the days of the typewriter’s mundane cling-clang sounding your progress on a shaky desktop, sadly, no more. Gonzo can bring the soul to bare, expose the pumping heart to new forms of oxygen and thrashing your sense of morals into a cloud of dust drifting over a Nevada highway. The mind hitting the wrong note can be far more fatal. The freakout, the irregular verbiage, the inevitable swearing at Christ, and the sheer terror in the eyes of the person who you somehow convinced this writing trip was a good idea: yourself. Writing is a hair-pulling, head-splitting exorcism of thoughts and ideas, sometimes delivered neatly and other times looking like a murder scene. Yeah, gonzo can be a fun time.
Road trips are fun like that too, at least they used to be. Before smart phones ruined a good time and made cogs out of every teenager, the young in my youth were just idealistic, ignorant and full of life and hormones, ready to laugh bowl-heartedly at the slightest prank or insult. These were the times of surf trips in beat up vans for two weeks down the East Coast and witnessing the flashing of teenage breasts at 70mph on the highway, spurred on no less by wearing a Richard Nixon mask. Surely, gonzo defined more than just a writing prose? Could it be a lifestyle, if done right?
At seventeen, I drove the “Red Shark,” a 1994 Pontiac Trans Am with T-Tops. It was a great car in it’s early days. I’d race that thing all over town. A bunch of us had Cameros and Firebirds. After school, we would race down King’s Road on a two way stretch, one time fifty people showed and parked off to the shoulder. There were also nights where the trunk was full of cases of beer, gradually disappearing as we moved from one house party to the next. Reckless, juvenile and care free. Other times it served as the de facto drug mobile, where marijuana smoke loomed heavy amongst the Tom Petty and Van Halen. There were plenty of moments that I regret, and am grateful that no one was killed. The point here is that those days were inspired by the music, the movies, and the books we read. Like today, pop culture carries a heavy pull towards its voices and its vices. And I consumed all three in the world of Hunter Thompson, so much so that a road trip to Vegas with a suitcase full of “laughers, shakers, screamers…etc.,” hatched itself to the point of looking for suitable convertibles.
Assuming his persona for Halloween or dress up was very much like Groucho Marx: one could become the harmless provocateur who epitomized over-the-top rebellion to social norms. I certainly wasn’t the only one capitalizing on Thompson’s reemergence in American pop culture in the late 90s/early 00s with the cult success of the film. But what really inspired all of this bad behavior on my part? Was I truly attempting to emulate someone I vaguely understood? Did I have a death wish? Or was I, like a lot of vulnerable young people, acting my age of carelessness because I didn’t know any better? The truth is more akin to myself being in the flux of teenage angst, high school disillusionment and the emotional unraveling my parents’ divorce had done to me, all of which I was far too immature and unready to face or understand. The true fear and loathing was within myself, and at times it became very destructive. So I turned to music and to literature to help numb the pain, occasionally succeeding while much of the time using them as an excuse to emulate the lifestyles depicted. Human beings are susceptible to things like this. When we see something we like, we want it for ourselves, to the point of justifying it’s debilitating pathos.
I remember when Thompson took his own life. It was February 2005 and my Philadelphia Eagles had just lost to Tom Brady’s New England Patriots in the Super Bowl. I was in the midst of my fascination with his work and persona, thumbing through books like the Proud Highway , a partial collection of his correspondence from his writing days in the 1950s and 1960s before drugs came into the picture. The person there is one of budding curiosity at his own literary powers, self-confident but aware of his underdevelopment. As a young writer myself, it was a worthy case study in how the good become great. But knowing how the great ended up, I could not help but read him with a sadness. If only… Thompson, suffering from decades of alcoholism and other medical ailments brought on by a bad hip and deteriorating physical prowess, ended his life eerily similar to the way Hemingway (Thompson’s hero) went out too. It was the waste of him, a potential not fully realized, that gave me an understanding of the mortality of not men but ideas. What was gonzo journalism really about? Was it just an excuse to get loaded, write out some half-baked gibberish and act like an asshole? Anyone could do that. I did do that. Or did Thompson invent something akin to flying too close to the sun, for the idea of rebellion can be a self-serving vehicle for anyone willing to buy the ticket and take the ride, but what if you can’t get off the ride? What if the nightmare you’re trying to extinguish is actually one of your own creation? Again, the balancing act of a tightrope walk. Was I an addict or a follower, or were the words interchangeable? Was Thompson a genius or an abuser, incapable of escaping self-inflicted wounds in order to fulfill an image of his own creation? Wounds fester when we refuse to own them and deal with them. I’m grateful for the lessons I learned in studying him so passionately for those ten years, both in his body of work and in the chaos he put his body through. It’s a cautionary tale of when worshipping an image to the detriment of the living person can have dire consequences for the mentor and pupil alike. What had made him a brilliant writer was also his undoing.
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”- The Proud Highway
If you haven’t read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, you probably should for no better reason than to understand his take on the dangers of consumer capitalism creating dependency rather than resiliency, and the naivety of the 1960s counterculture to enact meaningful change. Indeed, it’s not surprising nor shocking that by 1971, disillusionment within the counterculture movement was becoming a thing on par with the disillusionment in the mainstream culture it sought to undo. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Excess was already everywhere and the 1980s were still years away. It’s that startling revelation that guards Thompson’s writing from derailing into pure irrelevance, and what makes the book’s premise — of a societal pariah being no different from the ‘good’ people he seeks to expose — worthy of future readership.
For the best collection of HST at his peak, I recommend The Great Shark Hunt, which includes the Kentucky Derby story in its entirety, among other early gonzo musings that show the Good Doctor in full swing of his craft. Whatever your politics, he’s a model satirist who gives legitimacy to free thinking mutants everywhere. It’s a voice that speaks for a side of ourselves we often dare not give voice to. That dark realm within our souls that acts on impulse, that seeks freedom, and that has a disdain for authority. It’s a Romanticized version of a type of underdog who never has a real shot at victory because victory isn’t the point. The real test is how far you can push it, a.k.a. the edge. Like all art, the best is typically found in the ones that seek new plateaus and discovers new worlds. Fuck conformity. Case point: Ralph Steadman’s work. Boundaries are purposely discarded and destroyed. To be offensive is really just asking what is it to be offended.
I admire him and will forever be a disciple of gonzo. And as I sit here writing yet another semi-obituary, my eyes find a framed picture of him in my office. A Dunhill cigarette filling his lungs with fuel and his eyebrows cocked in suspense. Behind the aviator sunglasses aren’t bats swooping and screeching, but two razor sharp, blood-shot beams shining clarity onto the darkened highway of life. And with the ability to see the road ahead, somewhere on the edge of the desert, where the drugs take hold, lies the American Dream. It’s not for everyone and can be fatal. Success is not guaranteed in these parts. But if the other option is to idly plod through life unchallenged and untested, to conform, surely we all can muster up the courage to do and be something else. Remember, to confront the great beast (life), one must be prepared to damage themselves in the process. Perhaps with just one caveat: leave the ether at home.
Mahalo.