Here is my one Hunter story. From a column about him at National Review.
Sometime around 1990 Hunter and Jann Wenner, founder and editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone, were invited to speak at Columbia University. I sensed at that time that Hunter was on the downward slide and this could be his last hurrah and so I agree to tag along. I decide at the top of the evening to stay until the end of the end wherever that might lead.
Our small group meets in the green room at Columbia. We stand around slugging from a bottle of Chivas Regal. Around and around the bottle goes. Of course, Hunter is well ahead of us, having started much earlier. We stumble upstairs for the speech.
The hall is filled to the rafters, I mean absolutely filled. Hunter and Jann sit at a table center stage. Hunter slurs and slurs, and slugs from the Chivas and hacks up oranges with a huge machete. At one point Jann, wearing natty French cuffs, is lustily booed for being a corporate sell out. Hunter keeps passing the only bottle of scotch through the stage curtain to those of us backstage. “Speech” over, we head cross town to Elaine’s, the longtime watering hole of New York writers and Hollywood outriders.
Keeping with my pledge to ride this pony right down to the ground, I plant myself right next to Hunter at our table of now about ten. We are all pretty drunk, but Hunter is wasted. Still he orders about five courses and eats every morsel. He even eats all the bread, which he heavily butters and covers with pepper. I try to engage him in conversation and I swear hardly the only words I understand are “Nixon,” “Peru,” and “acid.” Along with everything else, Hunter is tripping.
At one point Hunter leans over to me and says something on the order that he is going to the bathroom and there is a guy staring at him from the bar and that I am to watch his back. “Errrr, O.K., Hunter.” Hunter gets up and heads to the men’s room, Jann follows him and sure enough the guy at the bar gets up and follows them both. I join the parade and when I round the turn I see this: The guy from the bar is leaning his full weight on the men’s room door, bending it so far back I can see Jann understandably cowering inside. So, I grab the guy and pull him away from the door and back down the hallway. The whole bar descends on the cacophony in that tight little hallway; bartenders, waiters, patrons. Hunter comes out of the men’s room, comes up to the guy and the guy says this, really loud; “I just wanted to get stoned with you, man.”
The hallway clears, they take the guy back to the bar (they don’t toss him out; Elaine’s is a remarkably forgiving place), and Hunter grabs me and pulls me into the lady’s room whereupon he pulls out a huge bag of cocaine. “It’s not very good,” he says, “but there is a lot of it.” Thankfully, almost immediately Tommy-the-good-bartender yanks us out of the lady’s room and puts us back at our table.
I do not remember much of the rest of the evening except that I am the last one to clear out; well, me, Hunter, and his “secretary.” It is the weeist of hours. Hunter’s limousine takes us downtown. He pulls up somewhere on Central Park South. Hunter gets out and weaves along the sidewalk, scotch bottle in one hand, “secretary” in the other. I yell out to him, “Hunter, where are you going?” “Take the limo,” he says, “He’ll take you wherever you want to go…”
I slump against the window as the car takes me the few blocks to my Upper West Side apartment. The morning joggers are jogging. People are walking briskly to work. The trash trucks are making that beeping sound that is joyful first thing in the morning but deeply depressing at the end of night. One cannot do this thing too many times or for too long and Hunter did both, and now he has a bullet in his brain.
As I read the post I found myself thinking “this would be a great guy to sit down and drink a beer with. Then I read your post. Holy shit. This guy was truly one of a kind.
OK, here's another Hunter T story that nobody knows. In early 1983, our obscure little startup decided to have a party to celebrate its first (short) fiscal year and its first million dollars in sales. IPOF I discovered the million-dollar total in adding up the books so that it would be possible to file our corporate tax, having deferred our 1982 reporting year because I didn't have things ready by the end of December; and our CEO, John Walker, decided a party was in order. (I was at the time the official CFO of the corporation, being the only one ready and able to take time away from my real job of writing software -- also able to tolerate accountants and lawyers, which I enjoyed, unlike anyone else there.) And, being a fan of gonzo journalism, John managed to engage Hunter Thompson to come as guest of honor! The hope was that we could interest him in writing a gonzo companion to The Soul of a New Machine, about the development of a new line of minicomputers, but based in the Bay Area rather than Boston and involving a bunch of software freaks, not respectable young hardware engineers.
But alas, it was no success, as HT spent his time sitting around and drinking Wild Turkey. And somewhat later when we hired a new respectable Chief Financial Officer, we found out that he was living in Sausalito, next door to a crazy loud drunk, who turned out to be Hunter Thompson, whom the new CFO had never heard of.
I wish I could contribute this to the Wikipedia article on John Walker, but of course it is not documented in any respectable published book, nor even in The Autodesk File, which remains available on the Internet, thanks to John's work.
Thanks for sharing your story. I had a similar experience with another Big Name entertainer from that era, who never showed up to do his show because he was drunk. I believe both of these men were miserable and narcissistic, and looked at the world through dark-tinted glasses. They did not know how to find happiness, so they drank.
I would give Hunter points for being eerily prescient about the state of the culture. When he wrote about the Hells Angels he seemed to predict what became MAGA culture, and this was in the 1960s! He made some observations that were spot on.
You can't just blame the individuals. Our modern western culture is shallow, and tells the individual to look primarily at themselves and how they are doing right now, and don't care about anything else. Our institutions are similar. They are starving our souls, so no wonder people are unhappy.
We are "wired," but not connected. We are no longer humans, but "brands" to be sold, and sold some more, until the end of time.
This culture is profoundly wrong about important things. There are a lot of things people don't want to look at, but must, in themselves, and elsewhere.
You mentioned "The Soul of a New Machine." Great book for its time, and some things haven't changed, even today. Have a look at "Apple in China" for an update, at least on the hardware side. It's a bit concerning, put it that way. The idea of "progress" is looking absurd at this point.
Did you ever read "The Serial" by Cyra McFadden? A hilarious account of a proto-woke culture that had developed in Marin County. Was made into a terrible movie. It shows that you do not have to put people down or call them scumbags in order to critique what they are doing. You don't have to pass the bile, just a mirror.
Sometimes, it is so funny you have to laugh! And we all need a good laugh...
Beneath the surface froth of both Thompson and Trump I can’t help feeling that their personalities are very similar. Needless to say Thompson had more skill as a writer, but in his own awful way Trump is an effective writer. Both left a trail of destruction behind them that overturned the established order. Arguably, Thompson created something new and valuable in both the literary and philosophical terrains, but there are those who think that true of Trump. Not that I’m one of them I hasten to add. But if one adheres to the “move fast and break things” concept that has become so popular among certain types, one might consider Thompson to be the progenitor of Trump. It’s curious how apparent opposites can share so many attributes.
Thanks. I’m a believer in paradox so losing objectivity and clarity is a good thing on the road to objectivity and clarity. You know, get reoriented. Deal with what’s out there whether it’s “real” or not.
Something we've sadly lost. I try to craft emails in the way i used to letters, but i suspect they arent even read to the end. But its different to sit down with a piece of paper that someone has covered in their handwriting(or typescript) solely for your consideration. Thats not swiped away so easily.
Not to mention you can view the work in its entirety, instead of through a scrolling little window.
I may be crazy but i do think the way words enter or leave my brain matters, in a very real way. Something is lost when we send our words digitally, compressed away perhaps.
"..because who has the patience to learn in such a painstaking, arduous way?" Only those who really want to learn, i guess. I was surprised to read this, i thought it was common knowledge that this is how one masters something. Which isnt a flex, ive mastered few things yet. But those things i have, this is how i did it. And unless one has a "master" to teach you(probably employing this very method), what other way is there? You follow those who came before until you find yourself with no path under you, and viola, youre a master of whatever it is youre doing.
Edit: i might add that the whole path analogy isnt my own. I cant remember where i came across it, and i may have altered it slightly, i cant remember.
Yes. During the pandemic and old friend of mine (going back to the late 70s) and I began to correspond via letters. It really brought me back to a time when that's all that there was.
It's sad to see the act of physical writing go away. And this isn't just nostalgia. There's a lot of research out there showing that writing things down by hand has many benefits, including the retention of facts (note taking is the perfect example).
Ive used this little trick for years, bc i heard something about the act of writing helping you remember. Say im somewhere that i dont have pen and paper(and ofc nowadays a phone), but i need to remember something, ill write it with my finger on my leg, making sure to deliberately make each letter "clearly". Works like a charm, even for random numbers.
Ive also found this works with a phone, where ill type out a note to myself but then wont have to go back to the note to recall it.
And that all meshes nicely with the "thought/word/deed" concept, which ive also gotten alot of mileage out of.
Writing is a pretty mysterious thing really. Something we invented for ourselves, that we do(as opposed to a substance we take, or a physical alteration), that literally changes how our brains work, and what our brains can do.
Funny how what used to be a highly valued skill has become something most people cant be bothered to do. Which will eventually lead to it being highly valued again..
"...Nixon was a Navy man and he should have been buried at sea..."
"...These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist's style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.
The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable - some with legal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.
It would also play into the hands of those millions of self - stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open - sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin..."
"...It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105 - mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children..."
Well, it's lunatic, and hilarious, which is why I took the time I did in putting it in this section. However, comparing Nixon and Thompson in terms of accomplishment is like comparing Ulysses Grant with The Rolling Stones.
I think often now about how HST would cover Trump... He loathed (and skewered) Nixon... but what Nixon did is laughable at this point compared to Trump. (Ditto Clinton's scandal.) It boggles the mind.
You’re not the only one. A quick search finds much on the subject from the time of the first Trump presidency. Not so much recently. The consensus seems to be that he would skewer him. I am not so certain. I could see that he might turn towards the right in his older age much as James Howard Kunstler, another fine and insightful writer, did. Heretical as it sounds, an inner awareness of this shift could have precipitated the feelings that lead to his suicide. This from The Nation:
“Thompson observed that the Hells Angels were alienated from a changing America in which they felt left behind.
Most people read Hell’s Angels for the lurid stories of sex and drugs. But that misses the point entirely. What’s truly shocking about reading the book today is how well Thompson foresaw the retaliatory, right-wing politics that now goes by the name of Trumpism. After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their “ethic of total retaliation” against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d been counted out and left behind. Thompson saw the appeal of that retaliatory ethic. He claimed that a small part of every human being longs to burn it all down, especially when faced with great and impersonal powers that seem hostile to your very existence. In the United States, a place of ever greater and more impersonal powers, the ethic of total retaliation was likely to catch on.
What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter. For Thompson, the Angels weren’t important because they heralded a new movement of cultural hedonism, but because they were the advance guard for a new kind of right-wing politics. As Thompson presciently wrote in the Nation piece he later expanded on in Hell’s Angels, that kind of politics is “nearly impossible to deal with” using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left.“
Lots of interesting points here. It's appreciated. I'll be reflecting.
As an aside, do you think DFW's suicide is, in a similar vein, about foresight of what was to come, self-knowledge, a realization that he'd do poorly in the culture that was on the horizon?
Honestly, I can’t speculate about DFW’s suicide because I am not familiar enough with him, his writings, or his life. I possibly shouldn’t have done so with HST beyond the real topic at hand. As a person who has suicidal thoughts at times - and has known a number of suicides, I think there’s a mystery to all suicides. They’re individual and unknowable to anyone else. Sure, there’s the obvious level of depression or hopelessness, but what gets one to act upon those feelings with such finality is another thing altogether. The character Wheeler in William Golding’s “To the Ends of the Earth” blows his head off reportedly because he was afraid of drowning (at least in the BBC film version). That seems to be more than just an ordinary case of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face - but, perhaps and yet, maybe that’s all any suicide is.
Sorry to hear about your own personal struggles, and I agree that it's best not to speculate.
Sadly, this subject hits close to home for me as well.
I feel obliged to add my standard cautionary note that suicide is particularly horrible because of the ripple effect on others who even tangentially know a person. Saving yourself is actually a truly altruistic act. It's saving the people in your orbit from extreme grief/loss/trauma over duration.
You are so right. I never saw it as altruism but the thought of what a suicide would do to my family and friends certainly has helped me not go through with such a thing. Ultimately, I have come to see that the personal struggles are almost the point of life. I mean, happy boredom and normalcy is a form of living death, right? We’re here to learn and a little stimulus is no bad thing. I have also cultivated an extraordinarily inappropriate sense of humour to help me deal with difficulties. What if friends and family were all to say, “Good riddance to bad rubbish!”? That would be pretty mortifying.
However, I caution that inappropriate humour can often lead to causing offense to those who are not so desperate for a laugh.
Jonathan, that chapter in Mason's book deals in part with this matter. The book itself is otherwise entirely about extremely strange cases of damage to the brain. It's unfortunate that such a remarkable piece of writing is in a book which is going to have limited appeal, but I do recommend that anyone who is walking on the edge of quicksand buy the book if only for that chapter.
Like you said, "We're here to learn." Being a lifelong learner, taking it one day at a time, maintaining a sense of wonder, we all do what we can to make our lives feel meaningful in the face of the great difficulty of being human.
I'm sorry you're struggling. My recommendation, aside from Christian conversion, which is out of my power to kindle, is that you get a copy of Michael Paul Mason's book, "Head Cases." Either the last chapter or a long penultimate chapter is about suicide.
Being one myself, I recognize that even devout people can be lured by pain into active consideration of suicide. I wish I could remember the name of his book from about fifty years ago, but a writer named A. Alvarez believed that the mood necessary to support a suicide developed as something akin to a seduction. It's been over a decade since I read the Mason book, but my impression is that his view was similar to Alvarez's.
Well, I’m a lost cause with the practice of Christianity but the cause of treating others with compassion and kindness lives on - and is not solely Christian. Thanks for the recommendation of the books.
It's not within my purview to draw conclusions about why you consider yourself a lost cause to the practice of Christianity. God knows that some "Christians" may have been a huge part of it, and if so, I am sorry.
The thing is, though, that if you think Christianity is for "good" people, we are all lost causes. Christ came to save people who are quite convinced of their essential inability to satisfy the standard of goodness, and hence, of godliness, as they are.
I do suggest that the Psalms and The Gospel of John can effuse a tranquility in a soul which is roiled. Have you ever read Psalm 88? It's the one Psalm which never fails to shock a first time reader, because it is the one Psalm in which all is darkness, and there doesn't appear to be even the possibility of a change in the Psalmist's circumstances. It is, in other words, a realistic portrayal of the way a life can be for those of us "under the sun." In my case, for reasons I won't go into, the Psalmist's misery in verse 15 about the collusion of circumstances to kill him since his youth has a special resonance.
A question I have is why did he strain to emphasize his "gonzo" behavior when it is clear he was far more curious and refined? Did he resent the"Ivy league types? When I lived in Boulder a friend was a server at a Pearl st restaurant bar and claimed that HST and a guy named Bob Brown of "Soldier of Fortune" were drinking heavily and insulting the wide swath of patrons. Police were called but they left after HST calmly told them he would leave before any of the patrons would be cut or shot. I wonder if he hated becoming what he despised.
During my 17 years in Aspen and a semi-regular at the Woody Creek Tavern I retain a few memorable moments of Hunter revelations. "Crack is ruining the drug culture" is a favorite.
Be careful taking Thompson at his word. A few of the stories you quoted here were ones he made up. He was certainly not involved with the FBI at age 9 and the whole story about how he got fired prior to his move to NYC was also classic Thompson mythmaking. He also never typed out The Great Gatsby. He merely copied a few pages. This is one that others made up. He never made that claim.
I debunked these and many others in my book, High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism (2021).
Yeah, you are right. He's told a good story and I appreciate seeing the love for HST and the appreciation of some overlooked qualities ("hidden discipline" among them). I spent too many years trying to get the facts straight and correcting errors, so they tend to jump out at me. I believe HST should be taken seriously as a writer and personally I think that means doing away with the myth. We can appreciate the myth in his books but when we write about him, I think we should do better and get the truth.
You have caused me to break my vow not to buy any more books this month! Oh, well! Books will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no books. Plus I have an untested theory that as long as I have a stack of unread books at hand I will not find the time to die. So far, so good. But, I promise to read your book before some of the others keeping me alive.
And then I had to also buy a copy of “ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories” for reference ‘cos it’s so long since I read it. This is an expensive posting from our host and various commenters!
I’m not the one to ask. I am relatively ignorant of HST’s work. I remember the Hell’s Angels book got me decades ago. Partially because I knew some of the people in it.
Also, full confession, I essentially stole the aphorism. The original was in a Furry Freak Brothers’ comic by Dan O’Neill (I think) and “books” was “dope.” I usually use it with”music” in the place of either word.
Absolutely! It amazes me that people think truth is optional. Where did they get that self-destructive idea from? If the writers aren't honest with us, why the hell should we read them? Truth is the bar they MUST cross.
Aren't there are already enough people lying to us for profit?
This world is full of dysfunctional people. We can learn from their examples and try not to end up like they did. Sometimes people do bring troubles on themselves, but blame others. They play the victim card, over and over.
People who play with fire might get burned. Respect the fire.
Never ran into Hunter Thompson, so I don't know how he really was. But reading the story about the drunken Thompson reminded me of the comedian with a similar persona who was supposed to do a show at my school, but the show never happened because he was drunk. This comedian ended up with a lot of disappointed ex-fans.
People who are in the public eye are supposed to be good role models, not the example of what NOT to do. Today, it is often the other way around. Instead of stopping fights, they start them! This will not end well.
Maybe we should celebrate people who do show up and keep their promises? They do exist. They just aren't usually glamorous, or famous. They are not attention seekers. We wouldn't be here without them. Here's a couple:
Please note that I do not think truth, or the truth, is optional. I think, however, that it may take many forms.
The subject of myth is far more than I feel capable of taking on in this discussion. If I may, I will leave it as myth is the inner dimension, or dimensions, of truth.
If you knew some of the people Thompson wrote about...well, did he get it right? I will take you as the subject matter expert here, since I know nothing about it.
Or did he invent? Because if he did, this is not merely an error, for a non-fiction writer this is a sin, and gets you fired from newspapers.
You have to play it straight with your readers, you can't make stuff up. If you want to write fiction, that's one thing, but people gotta know it is a work of the imagination. Or if you want to do a Kerouac, the reader has to understand that this is a purely subjective account of how it looked to him. And in Kerouac's case, apparently his writing was not as entirely spontaneous as we were led to believe.
When facts were scarce, and transmitted by telegraph, you couldn't waste a word, so you got straight to the point. "War was declared."
But now we are drowning in facts, pseudo-facts, images, opinions, emotions, and it is getting hard to tell what is what.
Our culture is also drowning in the false belief that the way it "looks to me" is therefore the way it actually is. Me and my "personal truth," me and my "alternative facts." Me and my opinions. Me and my emotions. Me, and mine! ME, without limits! We are lost in mental subjectivity.
This is not even rebellion, it is just drinking Kool Aid. A trance. America is a land of dreamers that need to wake up. But people hate being woken up...
"I don’t suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!"
Some dreams are nightmares. Some want to inflict their nightmares on others, and are doing so.
We have gone this way before and should have learned, but didn't. We saw what Jim Jones, for instance, did to his followers, and to those who came to investigate. He murdered them. We saw what Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc did. Do we need any more examples of insanity?
When the insane shooter went into Sandy Hook Elementary one of the first people he killed was my best friend's step-daughter.
Insanity is no joke.
We need to wake up and get real, whether we feel like it or not, or whether it is what the fashionable "cool" kids do or not. We need to escape from escape-ism, which is a trap.
If you read Thompson's early work as a reporter, he actually was capable of wide-open discovery, but over time he came to live in his personal hellscape world-lens, and we all know how that ended.
The Angels couldn't (or wouldn't) help themselves, nor could Hunter Thompson. Hunter picked his poison, and drank it to the end.
The blind cannot lead the blind, except off a cliff.
If America (and the world) would come out of the collective trance and stop beating up each other it would be better, but right now, cruelty and retaliation are the way of the world, and there will be hell to pay.
Yes, the combatants do not like it when anybody tries to stop the fighting. But if nobody does that, they might kill each other, or us all.
There was that time when if ya weren’t a 2 fisted cocaine addled, alcoholic, heroin addict you couldn’t write, play jazz or paint. Known too many who came up short of HST stature but wasted their short lives trying. Some got wasted cause they weren’t poets. Exhausting. As the end draws nearer, seems like a bad bet.
Hunter is one of my all time favorite authors and his work was one I always had a deep appreciation for. My first time reading his work was with the Rum Diary and there was one scene in particular that horrified me. This scene was of an American tourist getting essentially mass assaulted at a dance party. She stripped down naked and was too drunk and caught up in the rhythm of the music to realize that wolves were circling her and unfortunately they attacked just as hunter was dragged away screaming and yelling at the top of his lungs. The way this scene was written and handled was chilling and from that point I was heavily invested in the story and by the end I learned that not every country that a woman travels to is safe....shit there is nowhere that a woman can go where she is 100% safe or can afford not to take precautions and to travel abroad believing otherwise is LUNACY.
Ralston Steenrod! A name more likely to have emerged from HST’s imagination.
This is great! The book and cast of characters are yours, of course, but may I suggest two musicians? Mingus & Garcia.
Perhaps you can track down the story about the fight between Juan Tizol and Mingus during his very brief but long wished for residency as Ellington’s bassist. As I heard it, a knife was pulled.
Mingus wrote about it in his memoir, which I think is called "Beneath the Underdog." It happened during Mingus' extremely brief time with Duke Ellington, and Mingus' recounting of what Ellington said to him when he fired him is spectacularly funny.
Damn you, Ted, you've done it again... prompted me to play hooky for the morning I should be working through.
I bought Fear and Loathing in LV as I was leaving home at 16 in June '77 to start work in Alberta's Oil Patch on a seismic crew (surveying for oil & gas deposits). Best friend Pete and I each had a copy as we hopped on the flight from Toronto to Calgary. We'd smuggled along a 5-gram vial of honey oil (a delicious, smokeable cannabis derivative common to Toronto in the '70s which we'd smear on a paper and roll up with a little baccy and cardboard filter. It had the added benefit of smelling much like tobacco, meaning one could smoke it almost anywhere, including airplanes, without raising much suspicion).
We arrived in Cowtown around 10pm, cabbing it downtown to the Success Hotel -- $6/night. On entry we were offered a snort of white powder, allegedly PCP, off the reception area coffee table by some friendly scruffy-looking types, and politely declined. Our room smelled like stale cigs, beer and puke, had fake wood panelling, a TV on the wall and a window looking onto a roof covered in empty beer bottles. Perfect.
Pete already had a roughneck gig on a drilling rig lined up by his dad who worked in energy. I had the promise of a job once I made a call. Both of us hesitated making our respective calls, and instead lay in our respective beds for a week, rolling spliff after spliff, reading our favourite passages out loud, and laughing our very stoned asses off. We were both high school drop-outs who'd done terribly in school and just wanted to escape our circle of disappointed parents and bad seeds back home.
I doubt we thought about it then, but this moment marked our transition from teen punks to working men, guided by the mastery, hilarity and bad example-setting of Mr Hunter S. Thompson.
After that lost week, Pete took a job on Hi-Tower 2, the second-biggest land-based drilling rig on earth at that time, and I was driven by my new boss to High River, south of Calgary, where he handed me a mittful of keys and instructed me to "gas up all the trucks," around a dozen, and left me alone in a big parking lot by the grain elevators and train tracks. The trucks were a mix of 4WD Ford F150s and one-ton 4WD Dodge Power Wagons, all equipped for off-roading, with mud tires and winches, the one-tons being flatbeds with a few tons of seismic geophones hanging on racks and miles of half-inch cable lying in big plywood boxes.
I was inspired by Hunter's sweet driving writing that Sunday afternoon as I taught myself how to drive stick and reverse using side mirrors. I'd only ever driven the family car, an automatic, prior to that day. My highlight was driving the shooter's truck through town, loaded to the gills with geogel, a high explosive we used to set off detonations at 60ft depth, the sound waves of which bounced off the deep earth and were collected and logged by our geophones and recording truck.
Almost two years of seismic adventuring all over the cactus deserts, muskeg swamplands and vast forests of Alberta, Sask and BC followed for me. Pete spent that summer on Hi-Tower 2, heading home a rock of a man, and then off to art school in London. He's now one of the world's most prominent painters and has made a tidy fortune off his acid-inspired works. I went on to have a life of amazing overseas adventures, before fluking into life as a copywriter in Singapore at age 35. That was 30 years ago.
I still think of Hunter's wily calls to unruliness each morning as I sit down to pound at a keyboard.
I tried rereading FALILV when the movie came out and was saddened to find both disappointing. But that's OK. Hunter's spirit has forever inflected me, goading me to write daily and read hard, while keeping me foolish and predisposed toward bad and dangerous modes of living mostly involving overpowered motorcycles, mud and excellent company.
There's so much wonderful Hunter S. Thompson lore, and a lot of this lore continues to be unearthed by those in his tribe. Some great stories here on Substack if you know what writers to follow. Dan Dunn, for example, is one of them.
One of my favorites is something that came full circle 50+ years later. As a young, aspiring literary type, he went to Ketchum, Idaho, after Ernest Hemingway's death on assignment to write about Hemingway's legacy in the Idaho mountains for a magazine. In a bout of immature stupidity, he stole a pair of elk antlers from Hemingway's cabin, where Mary Hemingway lived.
It remained at his home in Woody Creek until his death. His widow, Anita, later said, "He had so much respect for Hemingway. He was actually very embarrassed by it." And in his final interview with the late Playboy editor Tim Mohr in 2004, he shared a piece of wisdom that "it's bad karma to brag about the things you got away with." I almost wonder if stealing those antlers was the "thing he got away with" he was referring to? Perhaps in a starry-eyed delusion of grandeur on assignment for a writing gig, or plain old drunkenness, Hunter thought it had some mystical kismet that, by stealing them, he would go on to become a literary star himself. A couple of years later, he wrote Hell's Angels, and voilà, he did!
Anyway. Nine years ago, his widow, Anita, made some calls to Hemingway's grandchildren and returned them, to appraise the lords of karma.
I reported on this when it happened in August 2016, and it's one of my favorite things I've ever had the pleasure of writing:
Here is my one Hunter story. From a column about him at National Review.
Sometime around 1990 Hunter and Jann Wenner, founder and editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone, were invited to speak at Columbia University. I sensed at that time that Hunter was on the downward slide and this could be his last hurrah and so I agree to tag along. I decide at the top of the evening to stay until the end of the end wherever that might lead.
Our small group meets in the green room at Columbia. We stand around slugging from a bottle of Chivas Regal. Around and around the bottle goes. Of course, Hunter is well ahead of us, having started much earlier. We stumble upstairs for the speech.
The hall is filled to the rafters, I mean absolutely filled. Hunter and Jann sit at a table center stage. Hunter slurs and slurs, and slugs from the Chivas and hacks up oranges with a huge machete. At one point Jann, wearing natty French cuffs, is lustily booed for being a corporate sell out. Hunter keeps passing the only bottle of scotch through the stage curtain to those of us backstage. “Speech” over, we head cross town to Elaine’s, the longtime watering hole of New York writers and Hollywood outriders.
Keeping with my pledge to ride this pony right down to the ground, I plant myself right next to Hunter at our table of now about ten. We are all pretty drunk, but Hunter is wasted. Still he orders about five courses and eats every morsel. He even eats all the bread, which he heavily butters and covers with pepper. I try to engage him in conversation and I swear hardly the only words I understand are “Nixon,” “Peru,” and “acid.” Along with everything else, Hunter is tripping.
At one point Hunter leans over to me and says something on the order that he is going to the bathroom and there is a guy staring at him from the bar and that I am to watch his back. “Errrr, O.K., Hunter.” Hunter gets up and heads to the men’s room, Jann follows him and sure enough the guy at the bar gets up and follows them both. I join the parade and when I round the turn I see this: The guy from the bar is leaning his full weight on the men’s room door, bending it so far back I can see Jann understandably cowering inside. So, I grab the guy and pull him away from the door and back down the hallway. The whole bar descends on the cacophony in that tight little hallway; bartenders, waiters, patrons. Hunter comes out of the men’s room, comes up to the guy and the guy says this, really loud; “I just wanted to get stoned with you, man.”
The hallway clears, they take the guy back to the bar (they don’t toss him out; Elaine’s is a remarkably forgiving place), and Hunter grabs me and pulls me into the lady’s room whereupon he pulls out a huge bag of cocaine. “It’s not very good,” he says, “but there is a lot of it.” Thankfully, almost immediately Tommy-the-good-bartender yanks us out of the lady’s room and puts us back at our table.
I do not remember much of the rest of the evening except that I am the last one to clear out; well, me, Hunter, and his “secretary.” It is the weeist of hours. Hunter’s limousine takes us downtown. He pulls up somewhere on Central Park South. Hunter gets out and weaves along the sidewalk, scotch bottle in one hand, “secretary” in the other. I yell out to him, “Hunter, where are you going?” “Take the limo,” he says, “He’ll take you wherever you want to go…”
I slump against the window as the car takes me the few blocks to my Upper West Side apartment. The morning joggers are jogging. People are walking briskly to work. The trash trucks are making that beeping sound that is joyful first thing in the morning but deeply depressing at the end of night. One cannot do this thing too many times or for too long and Hunter did both, and now he has a bullet in his brain.
Requiescat in pace, dude.
Epic dude!
As I read the post I found myself thinking “this would be a great guy to sit down and drink a beer with. Then I read your post. Holy shit. This guy was truly one of a kind.
It was an epic night.
I felt like I was on that ride with you!
OK, here's another Hunter T story that nobody knows. In early 1983, our obscure little startup decided to have a party to celebrate its first (short) fiscal year and its first million dollars in sales. IPOF I discovered the million-dollar total in adding up the books so that it would be possible to file our corporate tax, having deferred our 1982 reporting year because I didn't have things ready by the end of December; and our CEO, John Walker, decided a party was in order. (I was at the time the official CFO of the corporation, being the only one ready and able to take time away from my real job of writing software -- also able to tolerate accountants and lawyers, which I enjoyed, unlike anyone else there.) And, being a fan of gonzo journalism, John managed to engage Hunter Thompson to come as guest of honor! The hope was that we could interest him in writing a gonzo companion to The Soul of a New Machine, about the development of a new line of minicomputers, but based in the Bay Area rather than Boston and involving a bunch of software freaks, not respectable young hardware engineers.
But alas, it was no success, as HT spent his time sitting around and drinking Wild Turkey. And somewhat later when we hired a new respectable Chief Financial Officer, we found out that he was living in Sausalito, next door to a crazy loud drunk, who turned out to be Hunter Thompson, whom the new CFO had never heard of.
I wish I could contribute this to the Wikipedia article on John Walker, but of course it is not documented in any respectable published book, nor even in The Autodesk File, which remains available on the Internet, thanks to John's work.
Thanks for sharing your story. I had a similar experience with another Big Name entertainer from that era, who never showed up to do his show because he was drunk. I believe both of these men were miserable and narcissistic, and looked at the world through dark-tinted glasses. They did not know how to find happiness, so they drank.
I would give Hunter points for being eerily prescient about the state of the culture. When he wrote about the Hells Angels he seemed to predict what became MAGA culture, and this was in the 1960s! He made some observations that were spot on.
You can't just blame the individuals. Our modern western culture is shallow, and tells the individual to look primarily at themselves and how they are doing right now, and don't care about anything else. Our institutions are similar. They are starving our souls, so no wonder people are unhappy.
We are "wired," but not connected. We are no longer humans, but "brands" to be sold, and sold some more, until the end of time.
This culture is profoundly wrong about important things. There are a lot of things people don't want to look at, but must, in themselves, and elsewhere.
You mentioned "The Soul of a New Machine." Great book for its time, and some things haven't changed, even today. Have a look at "Apple in China" for an update, at least on the hardware side. It's a bit concerning, put it that way. The idea of "progress" is looking absurd at this point.
Did you ever read "The Serial" by Cyra McFadden? A hilarious account of a proto-woke culture that had developed in Marin County. Was made into a terrible movie. It shows that you do not have to put people down or call them scumbags in order to critique what they are doing. You don't have to pass the bile, just a mirror.
Sometimes, it is so funny you have to laugh! And we all need a good laugh...
Beneath the surface froth of both Thompson and Trump I can’t help feeling that their personalities are very similar. Needless to say Thompson had more skill as a writer, but in his own awful way Trump is an effective writer. Both left a trail of destruction behind them that overturned the established order. Arguably, Thompson created something new and valuable in both the literary and philosophical terrains, but there are those who think that true of Trump. Not that I’m one of them I hasten to add. But if one adheres to the “move fast and break things” concept that has become so popular among certain types, one might consider Thompson to be the progenitor of Trump. It’s curious how apparent opposites can share so many attributes.
please Dude read HST and repeat until you begin to see the light https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRAFf2oePMM
Dont be a trump chump
Trump has created nothing. Nothing.
honey aint no arguably about it son
“Nice” to have such quick-draw comments from those who apparently have not comprehended what I wrote.
Because people lost objectivity and clarity the moment you said Trump. I think it’s a great observation. Well done.
Thanks. I’m a believer in paradox so losing objectivity and clarity is a good thing on the road to objectivity and clarity. You know, get reoriented. Deal with what’s out there whether it’s “real” or not.
I thought it was perceptive. Thompson was and Trump is a narcissist.
"It came from writing letters"
Something we've sadly lost. I try to craft emails in the way i used to letters, but i suspect they arent even read to the end. But its different to sit down with a piece of paper that someone has covered in their handwriting(or typescript) solely for your consideration. Thats not swiped away so easily.
Not to mention you can view the work in its entirety, instead of through a scrolling little window.
I may be crazy but i do think the way words enter or leave my brain matters, in a very real way. Something is lost when we send our words digitally, compressed away perhaps.
"..because who has the patience to learn in such a painstaking, arduous way?" Only those who really want to learn, i guess. I was surprised to read this, i thought it was common knowledge that this is how one masters something. Which isnt a flex, ive mastered few things yet. But those things i have, this is how i did it. And unless one has a "master" to teach you(probably employing this very method), what other way is there? You follow those who came before until you find yourself with no path under you, and viola, youre a master of whatever it is youre doing.
Edit: i might add that the whole path analogy isnt my own. I cant remember where i came across it, and i may have altered it slightly, i cant remember.
Yes. During the pandemic and old friend of mine (going back to the late 70s) and I began to correspond via letters. It really brought me back to a time when that's all that there was.
It's sad to see the act of physical writing go away. And this isn't just nostalgia. There's a lot of research out there showing that writing things down by hand has many benefits, including the retention of facts (note taking is the perfect example).
Ive used this little trick for years, bc i heard something about the act of writing helping you remember. Say im somewhere that i dont have pen and paper(and ofc nowadays a phone), but i need to remember something, ill write it with my finger on my leg, making sure to deliberately make each letter "clearly". Works like a charm, even for random numbers.
Ive also found this works with a phone, where ill type out a note to myself but then wont have to go back to the note to recall it.
And that all meshes nicely with the "thought/word/deed" concept, which ive also gotten alot of mileage out of.
Writing is a pretty mysterious thing really. Something we invented for ourselves, that we do(as opposed to a substance we take, or a physical alteration), that literally changes how our brains work, and what our brains can do.
Funny how what used to be a highly valued skill has become something most people cant be bothered to do. Which will eventually lead to it being highly valued again..
Masterful.
Massive HST sceptic here but this is brilliant stuff and makes me want to go back and red him again.
From HST's obituary for Richard Nixon:
"...Nixon was a Navy man and he should have been buried at sea..."
"...These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist's style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.
The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable - some with legal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.
It would also play into the hands of those millions of self - stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open - sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin..."
"...It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105 - mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children..."
What bad, infantile writing. (Seriously, it's just not very good.)
Nixon accomplished more in a week than Hunter Thompson did in his entire life.
Well, it's lunatic, and hilarious, which is why I took the time I did in putting it in this section. However, comparing Nixon and Thompson in terms of accomplishment is like comparing Ulysses Grant with The Rolling Stones.
Hunter pushed back against American babylon people like Nixon... would you rather have a world of Hunters or Dicks.... I mean small dicks of course😂
Neither.
well sure...😌
There’s a great story about Thompson and Nixon sharing a car during a campaign and getting on brilliantly over a shared love of American football.
Well done, Ted.
I think often now about how HST would cover Trump... He loathed (and skewered) Nixon... but what Nixon did is laughable at this point compared to Trump. (Ditto Clinton's scandal.) It boggles the mind.
You’re not the only one. A quick search finds much on the subject from the time of the first Trump presidency. Not so much recently. The consensus seems to be that he would skewer him. I am not so certain. I could see that he might turn towards the right in his older age much as James Howard Kunstler, another fine and insightful writer, did. Heretical as it sounds, an inner awareness of this shift could have precipitated the feelings that lead to his suicide. This from The Nation:
“Thompson observed that the Hells Angels were alienated from a changing America in which they felt left behind.
Most people read Hell’s Angels for the lurid stories of sex and drugs. But that misses the point entirely. What’s truly shocking about reading the book today is how well Thompson foresaw the retaliatory, right-wing politics that now goes by the name of Trumpism. After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their “ethic of total retaliation” against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d been counted out and left behind. Thompson saw the appeal of that retaliatory ethic. He claimed that a small part of every human being longs to burn it all down, especially when faced with great and impersonal powers that seem hostile to your very existence. In the United States, a place of ever greater and more impersonal powers, the ethic of total retaliation was likely to catch on.
What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter. For Thompson, the Angels weren’t important because they heralded a new movement of cultural hedonism, but because they were the advance guard for a new kind of right-wing politics. As Thompson presciently wrote in the Nation piece he later expanded on in Hell’s Angels, that kind of politics is “nearly impossible to deal with” using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left.“
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/this-political-theorist-predicted-the-rise-of-trumpism-his-name-was-hunter-s-thompson/
Lots of interesting points here. It's appreciated. I'll be reflecting.
As an aside, do you think DFW's suicide is, in a similar vein, about foresight of what was to come, self-knowledge, a realization that he'd do poorly in the culture that was on the horizon?
Honestly, I can’t speculate about DFW’s suicide because I am not familiar enough with him, his writings, or his life. I possibly shouldn’t have done so with HST beyond the real topic at hand. As a person who has suicidal thoughts at times - and has known a number of suicides, I think there’s a mystery to all suicides. They’re individual and unknowable to anyone else. Sure, there’s the obvious level of depression or hopelessness, but what gets one to act upon those feelings with such finality is another thing altogether. The character Wheeler in William Golding’s “To the Ends of the Earth” blows his head off reportedly because he was afraid of drowning (at least in the BBC film version). That seems to be more than just an ordinary case of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face - but, perhaps and yet, maybe that’s all any suicide is.
Sorry to hear about your own personal struggles, and I agree that it's best not to speculate.
Sadly, this subject hits close to home for me as well.
I feel obliged to add my standard cautionary note that suicide is particularly horrible because of the ripple effect on others who even tangentially know a person. Saving yourself is actually a truly altruistic act. It's saving the people in your orbit from extreme grief/loss/trauma over duration.
You are so right. I never saw it as altruism but the thought of what a suicide would do to my family and friends certainly has helped me not go through with such a thing. Ultimately, I have come to see that the personal struggles are almost the point of life. I mean, happy boredom and normalcy is a form of living death, right? We’re here to learn and a little stimulus is no bad thing. I have also cultivated an extraordinarily inappropriate sense of humour to help me deal with difficulties. What if friends and family were all to say, “Good riddance to bad rubbish!”? That would be pretty mortifying.
However, I caution that inappropriate humour can often lead to causing offense to those who are not so desperate for a laugh.
Jonathan, that chapter in Mason's book deals in part with this matter. The book itself is otherwise entirely about extremely strange cases of damage to the brain. It's unfortunate that such a remarkable piece of writing is in a book which is going to have limited appeal, but I do recommend that anyone who is walking on the edge of quicksand buy the book if only for that chapter.
Like you said, "We're here to learn." Being a lifelong learner, taking it one day at a time, maintaining a sense of wonder, we all do what we can to make our lives feel meaningful in the face of the great difficulty of being human.
I'm sorry you're struggling. My recommendation, aside from Christian conversion, which is out of my power to kindle, is that you get a copy of Michael Paul Mason's book, "Head Cases." Either the last chapter or a long penultimate chapter is about suicide.
Being one myself, I recognize that even devout people can be lured by pain into active consideration of suicide. I wish I could remember the name of his book from about fifty years ago, but a writer named A. Alvarez believed that the mood necessary to support a suicide developed as something akin to a seduction. It's been over a decade since I read the Mason book, but my impression is that his view was similar to Alvarez's.
Well, I’m a lost cause with the practice of Christianity but the cause of treating others with compassion and kindness lives on - and is not solely Christian. Thanks for the recommendation of the books.
It's not within my purview to draw conclusions about why you consider yourself a lost cause to the practice of Christianity. God knows that some "Christians" may have been a huge part of it, and if so, I am sorry.
The thing is, though, that if you think Christianity is for "good" people, we are all lost causes. Christ came to save people who are quite convinced of their essential inability to satisfy the standard of goodness, and hence, of godliness, as they are.
I do suggest that the Psalms and The Gospel of John can effuse a tranquility in a soul which is roiled. Have you ever read Psalm 88? It's the one Psalm which never fails to shock a first time reader, because it is the one Psalm in which all is darkness, and there doesn't appear to be even the possibility of a change in the Psalmist's circumstances. It is, in other words, a realistic portrayal of the way a life can be for those of us "under the sun." In my case, for reasons I won't go into, the Psalmist's misery in verse 15 about the collusion of circumstances to kill him since his youth has a special resonance.
I wish you the best, Jonathan.
A question I have is why did he strain to emphasize his "gonzo" behavior when it is clear he was far more curious and refined? Did he resent the"Ivy league types? When I lived in Boulder a friend was a server at a Pearl st restaurant bar and claimed that HST and a guy named Bob Brown of "Soldier of Fortune" were drinking heavily and insulting the wide swath of patrons. Police were called but they left after HST calmly told them he would leave before any of the patrons would be cut or shot. I wonder if he hated becoming what he despised.
This is SOOOOOO GREAT!!! And now I can't wait to go back and read the Zappa pieces! (ANOTHER one of my heroes!) THANKS!!!
yes yes yes... HST and Zappa saw shit.. most people.. not so much!!
During my 17 years in Aspen and a semi-regular at the Woody Creek Tavern I retain a few memorable moments of Hunter revelations. "Crack is ruining the drug culture" is a favorite.
Looking forward to Part 2!
Yeah, well, crack did ruin the drug culture! No need to be gonzo to know that.
Be careful taking Thompson at his word. A few of the stories you quoted here were ones he made up. He was certainly not involved with the FBI at age 9 and the whole story about how he got fired prior to his move to NYC was also classic Thompson mythmaking. He also never typed out The Great Gatsby. He merely copied a few pages. This is one that others made up. He never made that claim.
I debunked these and many others in my book, High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism (2021).
Ummm, you wouldn’t be letting the facts get in the way of a good story, would you?
And sometimes the truth lies between the events and yarn.
Mind you, I will now look for your book. Thanks.
Yeah, you are right. He's told a good story and I appreciate seeing the love for HST and the appreciation of some overlooked qualities ("hidden discipline" among them). I spent too many years trying to get the facts straight and correcting errors, so they tend to jump out at me. I believe HST should be taken seriously as a writer and personally I think that means doing away with the myth. We can appreciate the myth in his books but when we write about him, I think we should do better and get the truth.
You have caused me to break my vow not to buy any more books this month! Oh, well! Books will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no books. Plus I have an untested theory that as long as I have a stack of unread books at hand I will not find the time to die. So far, so good. But, I promise to read your book before some of the others keeping me alive.
I hope you enjoy it and don't die immediately after reading it.
If I do die immediately after reading it, I will ensure that it is not by suicide. Deal?
That seems fair. If I see your name in the obituaries, I'll assume you were mauled by a wild animal.
And then I had to also buy a copy of “ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories” for reference ‘cos it’s so long since I read it. This is an expensive posting from our host and various commenters!
Your third sentence is an aphorism which a sane America would observe.
I've never read "...Las Vegas," only "... on the Campaign Trail 1972." Which other Thompson do you recommend?
I’m not the one to ask. I am relatively ignorant of HST’s work. I remember the Hell’s Angels book got me decades ago. Partially because I knew some of the people in it.
Also, full confession, I essentially stole the aphorism. The original was in a Furry Freak Brothers’ comic by Dan O’Neill (I think) and “books” was “dope.” I usually use it with”music” in the place of either word.
Absolutely! It amazes me that people think truth is optional. Where did they get that self-destructive idea from? If the writers aren't honest with us, why the hell should we read them? Truth is the bar they MUST cross.
Aren't there are already enough people lying to us for profit?
This world is full of dysfunctional people. We can learn from their examples and try not to end up like they did. Sometimes people do bring troubles on themselves, but blame others. They play the victim card, over and over.
People who play with fire might get burned. Respect the fire.
Never ran into Hunter Thompson, so I don't know how he really was. But reading the story about the drunken Thompson reminded me of the comedian with a similar persona who was supposed to do a show at my school, but the show never happened because he was drunk. This comedian ended up with a lot of disappointed ex-fans.
People who are in the public eye are supposed to be good role models, not the example of what NOT to do. Today, it is often the other way around. Instead of stopping fights, they start them! This will not end well.
Maybe we should celebrate people who do show up and keep their promises? They do exist. They just aren't usually glamorous, or famous. They are not attention seekers. We wouldn't be here without them. Here's a couple:
https://thecinemaholic.com/is-stand-and-deliver-based-on-a-true-story/
https://www.thehour.com/local/article/jeff-smith-norwalk-school-band-director-obit-18488635.php
Please note that I do not think truth, or the truth, is optional. I think, however, that it may take many forms.
The subject of myth is far more than I feel capable of taking on in this discussion. If I may, I will leave it as myth is the inner dimension, or dimensions, of truth.
Thanks for responding.
If you knew some of the people Thompson wrote about...well, did he get it right? I will take you as the subject matter expert here, since I know nothing about it.
Or did he invent? Because if he did, this is not merely an error, for a non-fiction writer this is a sin, and gets you fired from newspapers.
You have to play it straight with your readers, you can't make stuff up. If you want to write fiction, that's one thing, but people gotta know it is a work of the imagination. Or if you want to do a Kerouac, the reader has to understand that this is a purely subjective account of how it looked to him. And in Kerouac's case, apparently his writing was not as entirely spontaneous as we were led to believe.
When facts were scarce, and transmitted by telegraph, you couldn't waste a word, so you got straight to the point. "War was declared."
But now we are drowning in facts, pseudo-facts, images, opinions, emotions, and it is getting hard to tell what is what.
Our culture is also drowning in the false belief that the way it "looks to me" is therefore the way it actually is. Me and my "personal truth," me and my "alternative facts." Me and my opinions. Me and my emotions. Me, and mine! ME, without limits! We are lost in mental subjectivity.
This is not even rebellion, it is just drinking Kool Aid. A trance. America is a land of dreamers that need to wake up. But people hate being woken up...
"I don’t suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!"
Some dreams are nightmares. Some want to inflict their nightmares on others, and are doing so.
We have gone this way before and should have learned, but didn't. We saw what Jim Jones, for instance, did to his followers, and to those who came to investigate. He murdered them. We saw what Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc did. Do we need any more examples of insanity?
When the insane shooter went into Sandy Hook Elementary one of the first people he killed was my best friend's step-daughter.
Insanity is no joke.
We need to wake up and get real, whether we feel like it or not, or whether it is what the fashionable "cool" kids do or not. We need to escape from escape-ism, which is a trap.
If you read Thompson's early work as a reporter, he actually was capable of wide-open discovery, but over time he came to live in his personal hellscape world-lens, and we all know how that ended.
https://www.openculture.com/2016/07/hunter-s-thompson-gets-confronted-by-the-hells-angels.html
The Angels couldn't (or wouldn't) help themselves, nor could Hunter Thompson. Hunter picked his poison, and drank it to the end.
The blind cannot lead the blind, except off a cliff.
If America (and the world) would come out of the collective trance and stop beating up each other it would be better, but right now, cruelty and retaliation are the way of the world, and there will be hell to pay.
Yes, the combatants do not like it when anybody tries to stop the fighting. But if nobody does that, they might kill each other, or us all.
We cannot just shut our eyes and walk away.
That's how it looks from here.
There was that time when if ya weren’t a 2 fisted cocaine addled, alcoholic, heroin addict you couldn’t write, play jazz or paint. Known too many who came up short of HST stature but wasted their short lives trying. Some got wasted cause they weren’t poets. Exhausting. As the end draws nearer, seems like a bad bet.
Hunter is one of my all time favorite authors and his work was one I always had a deep appreciation for. My first time reading his work was with the Rum Diary and there was one scene in particular that horrified me. This scene was of an American tourist getting essentially mass assaulted at a dance party. She stripped down naked and was too drunk and caught up in the rhythm of the music to realize that wolves were circling her and unfortunately they attacked just as hunter was dragged away screaming and yelling at the top of his lungs. The way this scene was written and handled was chilling and from that point I was heavily invested in the story and by the end I learned that not every country that a woman travels to is safe....shit there is nowhere that a woman can go where she is 100% safe or can afford not to take precautions and to travel abroad believing otherwise is LUNACY.
This is why I subscribe.
Ralston Steenrod! A name more likely to have emerged from HST’s imagination.
This is great! The book and cast of characters are yours, of course, but may I suggest two musicians? Mingus & Garcia.
Perhaps you can track down the story about the fight between Juan Tizol and Mingus during his very brief but long wished for residency as Ellington’s bassist. As I heard it, a knife was pulled.
Interesting to consider how bands concentrating on the music of both Mingus and Garcia continue to be functional to this day, long after their deaths.
Mingus wrote about it in his memoir, which I think is called "Beneath the Underdog." It happened during Mingus' extremely brief time with Duke Ellington, and Mingus' recounting of what Ellington said to him when he fired him is spectacularly funny.
Damn you, Ted, you've done it again... prompted me to play hooky for the morning I should be working through.
I bought Fear and Loathing in LV as I was leaving home at 16 in June '77 to start work in Alberta's Oil Patch on a seismic crew (surveying for oil & gas deposits). Best friend Pete and I each had a copy as we hopped on the flight from Toronto to Calgary. We'd smuggled along a 5-gram vial of honey oil (a delicious, smokeable cannabis derivative common to Toronto in the '70s which we'd smear on a paper and roll up with a little baccy and cardboard filter. It had the added benefit of smelling much like tobacco, meaning one could smoke it almost anywhere, including airplanes, without raising much suspicion).
We arrived in Cowtown around 10pm, cabbing it downtown to the Success Hotel -- $6/night. On entry we were offered a snort of white powder, allegedly PCP, off the reception area coffee table by some friendly scruffy-looking types, and politely declined. Our room smelled like stale cigs, beer and puke, had fake wood panelling, a TV on the wall and a window looking onto a roof covered in empty beer bottles. Perfect.
Pete already had a roughneck gig on a drilling rig lined up by his dad who worked in energy. I had the promise of a job once I made a call. Both of us hesitated making our respective calls, and instead lay in our respective beds for a week, rolling spliff after spliff, reading our favourite passages out loud, and laughing our very stoned asses off. We were both high school drop-outs who'd done terribly in school and just wanted to escape our circle of disappointed parents and bad seeds back home.
I doubt we thought about it then, but this moment marked our transition from teen punks to working men, guided by the mastery, hilarity and bad example-setting of Mr Hunter S. Thompson.
After that lost week, Pete took a job on Hi-Tower 2, the second-biggest land-based drilling rig on earth at that time, and I was driven by my new boss to High River, south of Calgary, where he handed me a mittful of keys and instructed me to "gas up all the trucks," around a dozen, and left me alone in a big parking lot by the grain elevators and train tracks. The trucks were a mix of 4WD Ford F150s and one-ton 4WD Dodge Power Wagons, all equipped for off-roading, with mud tires and winches, the one-tons being flatbeds with a few tons of seismic geophones hanging on racks and miles of half-inch cable lying in big plywood boxes.
I was inspired by Hunter's sweet driving writing that Sunday afternoon as I taught myself how to drive stick and reverse using side mirrors. I'd only ever driven the family car, an automatic, prior to that day. My highlight was driving the shooter's truck through town, loaded to the gills with geogel, a high explosive we used to set off detonations at 60ft depth, the sound waves of which bounced off the deep earth and were collected and logged by our geophones and recording truck.
Almost two years of seismic adventuring all over the cactus deserts, muskeg swamplands and vast forests of Alberta, Sask and BC followed for me. Pete spent that summer on Hi-Tower 2, heading home a rock of a man, and then off to art school in London. He's now one of the world's most prominent painters and has made a tidy fortune off his acid-inspired works. I went on to have a life of amazing overseas adventures, before fluking into life as a copywriter in Singapore at age 35. That was 30 years ago.
I still think of Hunter's wily calls to unruliness each morning as I sit down to pound at a keyboard.
I tried rereading FALILV when the movie came out and was saddened to find both disappointing. But that's OK. Hunter's spirit has forever inflected me, goading me to write daily and read hard, while keeping me foolish and predisposed toward bad and dangerous modes of living mostly involving overpowered motorcycles, mud and excellent company.
Back to work.
Am still not much of a Hunter fan, but that was some nice writing you just did.
Liked: "Back to work."
I know what you mean about the need to write. I just spent the better part of my own day doing it, here and elsewhere... :-)
Since this is real writing, not thumb typing, it better be good!
There's so much wonderful Hunter S. Thompson lore, and a lot of this lore continues to be unearthed by those in his tribe. Some great stories here on Substack if you know what writers to follow. Dan Dunn, for example, is one of them.
One of my favorites is something that came full circle 50+ years later. As a young, aspiring literary type, he went to Ketchum, Idaho, after Ernest Hemingway's death on assignment to write about Hemingway's legacy in the Idaho mountains for a magazine. In a bout of immature stupidity, he stole a pair of elk antlers from Hemingway's cabin, where Mary Hemingway lived.
It remained at his home in Woody Creek until his death. His widow, Anita, later said, "He had so much respect for Hemingway. He was actually very embarrassed by it." And in his final interview with the late Playboy editor Tim Mohr in 2004, he shared a piece of wisdom that "it's bad karma to brag about the things you got away with." I almost wonder if stealing those antlers was the "thing he got away with" he was referring to? Perhaps in a starry-eyed delusion of grandeur on assignment for a writing gig, or plain old drunkenness, Hunter thought it had some mystical kismet that, by stealing them, he would go on to become a literary star himself. A couple of years later, he wrote Hell's Angels, and voilà, he did!
Anyway. Nine years ago, his widow, Anita, made some calls to Hemingway's grandchildren and returned them, to appraise the lords of karma.
I reported on this when it happened in August 2016, and it's one of my favorite things I've ever had the pleasure of writing:
https://brobible.com/life/article/ernest-hemingway-elk-antlers-hunter-s-thompson/
Fear and Loathing is a great American novel... any questions kids???😆