Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (3 page)

Late one morning, Hunter came in and handed some manuscript pages to a couple of editors and me, then turned and motored out with nary a word. He had given us copies of the first section of “Vegas,” and by late afternoon most of the staff had read and digested them. We were flat knocked out. Between fits of laughter we ran our favorite lines back and forth to one another: “One toke? You poor fool. Wait until you see those goddamned bats!” Delivered in Hunter-ese, of course.

Between bouts of serious writing there was the usual goofing off and troublemaking. There were evenings of drug-fueled adventures that left more than a few staffers dazed and worn out. There were interesting characters who were part of his—and subsequently our—orbit, including
Oscar Zeta Acosta, who was the model for the “three-hundred-pound Samoan attorney” in “Vegas,” and his sometimes sidekick, a fellow named Savage Henry.

Early on we became familiar with Hunter’s penchant for fright wigs, bizarre recordings of animals in their death throes that would somehow find their way onto the office public address system, and novelty store pranks. One evening Jann invited a few of us over to his place on some pretext or other. We walked in and saw Hunter standing there in a torn tie-dyed T-shirt covered in red splotches. Brandishing what looked like a giant horse syringe, he announced that he was going to inject 151 proof rum directly into his navel. He then jammed the “needle” into his belly and doubled over as he let out a series of wails and groans. One of my companions almost fainted.

But the fun and games—for Hunter and for the rest of us—always took second position to the work. We loved what we were doing, and none more than he. Once, reflecting on the scrambling years of his early career, he stated that he had “no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.” His tongue, of course, was firmly in his cheek. He was serious about his craft and was an ongoing student of correct grammar and syntax, and enjoyed sharing that knowledge. One of our staff writers was quite talented but often taunted for the sloppiness of his copy. I stood by one day as Hunter patiently lectured him on the necessity of producing a clean manuscript and how it would complement his writing skills (Hunter was right). In fact, he went out of his way to be friendly and helpful, even solicitous, about our work. Hunter would somehow get wind of what I was assigning and often I’d find on my desk a note in his distinctive scrawl suggesting a source or a contact. The notes were always signed: OK/HST. He had a gift to inspire, and he lifted everybody’s game.

He could have played the star, but the really good ones never do.
Hells Angels
brought notoriety, and his Kentucky Derby piece for
Scanlan’s
as well as the early
Rolling Stone
appearances received attention. He chose to be a friend and colleague, and we responded in kind. When the sloppy manuscript guy heard that Hunter used swimming as a way to relax, he escorted Hunter to a scuba school a couple of blocks away where he could do laps when the pool was free.

When he was in town, Hunter became a low-key regular at Jerry’s Inn, the staff watering hole across the street. He was very much at home there at the bar, and would love to engage us, one-on-one, in everything from his heroes, Scott Fitzgerald and Joseph Conrad; to classic sportswriters such as Jimmy Cannon or Red Smith; to the fortunes of the Oakland Raiders, the scruffy, mean-spirited pro football team on which he had a few friends. He also loved to talk shop, about articles we would read in
Esquire
and elsewhere, which I like to think validated a few of the hours we spent in Jerry’s instead of in the office.

When Hunter embarked on the 1972 campaign trail, it signaled the end of one chapter and the beginning of another for both him and the magazine. At first there was no real blueprint other than establishing a presence with an office in Washington, D.C. But he quickly found himself reinventing the mission statement almost issue by issue, and pretty soon the assignment had become an endless road trip. He was always writing against extreme deadline and filing copy at the last possible minute, which became a crucible for both him and the magazine. I was mercifully out of the direct line of fire, with too many other things on my plate. But I was close enough to feel the terrible weight borne by Jann, associate editor David Felton, copy editor Charles Perry, and a heroic production staff. The now legendary Mojo Wire sat just a few feet from my office door. Night after night, in the midst of deadline frenzy, that infernal thing would be beeping away, signaling Hunter’s presence at the other end, while Jann or Felton stood by, waiting for the copy to be slowly ejected. It was as if he was always in our midst. And in the final accounting, those articles solidified
Rolling Stone
’s commitment to political coverage, made Hunter a true celebrity (for good and ill), and eventually resulted in a great book. It was a miracle of journalism under pressure, and only Hunter could have pulled it off.

A few months after the election we were sitting in Jerry’s. Hunter looked like hell and was clearly not in great spirits. For reasons that will ever elude me, I decided to give him a helpful lecture. Retire your alter ego Raoul Duke, I said. Or send him on a long vacation. Go back to being the journalist who wrote
Hells Angels
. Cut back a little on the drugs and the booze. He turned toward me as he reached into the pocket of his safari jacket. He gave me a look; nothing nasty, just
a look.
He extracted a
tab of Mr. Natural blotter acid from the pocket, stared me in the eye, and swallowed it. I got the message. Our conversation resumed.

The last time I worked with Hunter was on his “interdicted dispatch” from a rapidly falling Saigon in 1975. We pretty much lost contact after that, although I’d occasionally run into him in New York. The last time I spoke to him was at a 1996 celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
and the simultaneous publication of a Modern Library edition, an acknowledgment of his work by the literary establishment of which he was justly proud. It was a splendid evening. A lot of
Rolling Stone
alumni were there, and among the guests was Johnny Depp, Hunter’s great friend who would portray Raoul Duke, Doctor of Journalism, in the movie version of
Vegas
in 1998.

One of my favorite memories of Hunter goes back to the spring of 1973, and it’s actually on video tape. He had been sequestered at the Seal Rock Inn, on the western edge of San Francisco, finishing the final edits on
Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72
. A group of video journalists who had been assigned to do a documentary on
Rolling Stone
for public television had taped him at the hotel as he was preparing to leave, and he obliged them with a few minutes of classic Hunter S. Thompson gibberish and shtick.

But when he got to the office to say his good-byes before heading home to Colorado, the video crew had preceded him and closed in, peppering him with stupid questions. Hunter and I tried to ignore them by poring over his fan mail, which in itself was something to behold. Finally, Hunter gave up. He started moving down the hallway, looking back over his shoulder at me, saying, “I have to meet a guy across the street!” By the time he reached the exit, he was shouting, “I HAVE TO MEET A GUY ACROSS THE STREET!” Across the street was Jerry’s, naturally. The guy was me.

Hunter was a terrific writer whose unique talent and enthusiasm helped propel
Rolling Stone
forward at some crucial points in its early history. He was a swell drinking companion, a hell of a salesman, and yes, a little bit crazy. Crazy like a fox.

It’s been forty years since Hunter Thompson embarked on the presidential campaign trail and almost seven years since he passed away, but somehow he still manages to consume many of us to this day. When I began work on this book, I figured his total output for
Rolling Stone
exceeded four hundred fifty thousand words. The main text, after some pretty serious editing, is still about two hundred ten thousand words.

The selection process was easy: practically everything. Only four articles were omitted; they simply weren’t up to par with the other material. But this meant that cutting would be that much more difficult.

The campaign trail material was the least difficult to work with. It was specifically geared to the moment, and much of it had simply ceased being topical. But there were plenty of vignettes and colorful incidents, and the overall reporting has held up remarkably well.

A characteristic of Hunter’s writing is the long digression, or the shorter but carefully designed tangent. If a digression got in the way of the main narrative, out it came. The best example is “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl.” Almost half the article was a world-class digression on the Oakland Raiders, which had nothing to do with the contest itself. Of course if a digression or tangent was outrageously funny, it had to stay in. It would have been a crime to cut Hunter’s adventures riding the Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle. Such is also the case with “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” The excerpt presented here is a stand-alone section from Part II in which Duke and his attorney have their way with a hapless delegate to the district attorneys’ conference.

Curiously, the hardest article to cut was Hunter’s first piece for the magazine, “The Battle of Aspen,” which details his efforts to unseat the sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, through the use of “Freak Power.” I made a moderate initial cut, but the second time around I struggled and finally gave up. The damn thing was too intricate and dense.

The arc of Hunter’s relationship with
Rolling Stone
is pretty clear looking at the table of contents. His output from 1970 through 1972 was amazing, and Watergate and all things Nixon kept him involved through 1974. But when he was dispatched to the Ali-Foreman heavyweight championship fight in Zaire that year, he returned empty-handed. His
trip to Saigon as the Vietnam War wound down yielded an abbreviated, unfinished piece. A later excursion to Grenada yielded nothing. In the meantime, he had become—and would continue to be—a popular speaker on college campuses. The money was good and the appearances were plentiful. The writing just wasn’t there, for long periods.

When he would reappear in the pages of
Rolling Stone
, the results were often first-rate. In 1977, “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat” was a paean to his friend and sometimes nemesis Oscar Acosta, who had apparently perished in a drug deal gone bad. His two-part profile and interview with Muhammad Ali the following year was insightful and hilarious. Who else would leap into Ali’s hotel room wearing an African fright mask, sending the Champ into gales of laughter?

Another five-year absence ended with Hunter’s last great piece of reporting when he was sent to cover the sensational Roxanne Pulitzer divorce trial. “A Dog Took My Place” features Hunter at his best, exploring the sex-and-drugs culture of well-heeled Palm Beach denizens in wide-eyed amazement and disdain.

The 1990s would produce two late masterpieces. “Fear and Loathing in Elko” is a sustained fantasia of nightmare imagery featuring Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and a cast of weirdos. It is mordantly funny and dark—in fact much darker than “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” “Polo Is My Life” would prove to be his last great piece of lyrical, expansive writing, involving his observations on a sport for the wealthy, the lost world of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and sex dolls. It should be noted that these two articles, like his first for
Rolling Stone
, were extremely difficult to cut.