I once spent many agonizing minutes watching Hunter Thompson, who liked to boast that he could use the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon, trying to sign his name.
This was in late 1990, in a hotel room in New York City. A publicist asked him to autograph his latest book before she left, a little souvenir of hours spent trying to get the writer to do the most basic things, like get out of bed. Hunter would start writing, get distracted, pause, gather his wits, stare at his hand as if it were an alien life form, throw something. I thought, Signed books by this guy must be really scarce.
A few decades later, with Gonzo nostalgia in full swing, eBay was auctioning a signed copy of Generation of Swine or Songs of the Doomed nearly every day, usually with just the scribbled letters “HST.” Collectors sometimes bid hundreds of dollars. Most of the autographs must be fake, but probably a few are real. At this point, who can tell the difference?
It’s been almost half a century since the work that made Hunter’s name and more than a decade since his suicide, but he was so controversial, so denounced, and so celebrated that the smoke still hasn’t cleared. He was influential and entertaining, everyone must give him that, but did he ever become the artist that he so palpably longed to be? Was he a madman, or was he a writer who played a role and got trapped in it? Did his prodigious intake of drugs and alcohol weaken his work, or make it possible in the first place? Like most of the great American writers, he did his best work first; is his life a tragedy of blown opportunities and persistent decline, or fundamentally a success?
Hunter himself was plagued by doubt, and other opinions were sharply divided. Tom Wolfe, who worked some of the same territory, called him “the greatest comic writer of the twentieth century.” But Hunter’s first wife, Sandy, who made his career possible in so many ways, said, “Hunter wanted to be a great writer and he had the genius, the talent, and, early on, the will and the means. He was horrified by whom he had become and ashamed—or I really should say tortured. He knew he had failed.”
That’s pretty harsh. Few writers achieve the hallowed groves of immortality, and those that do follow different roads. Hawthorne, Melville, Gabriel García Márquez, and Nabokov made it on their work alone. Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Kerouac all found that the stories they wrote merged with the story they lived, and so did Hunter. It happened gradually but inexorably. The first edition of Hell’s Angels from 1967 has a picture of a member of the biker gang on the cover. The Modern Library edition, printed thirty years later, bears a photo of Hunter, who always made clear he was not an Angel.
One of Hunter’s biographers, William McKeen, calls him “the favorite writer for many people who didn’t read books.” He stands in front of his work, often obscuring it. The books about him, including a half-dozen full-scale biographies, outnumber the books he wrote. There are movies (both Bill Murray and Johnny Depp played Hunter, not very successfully), documentaries, memoirs, comic books, lavish oversized reprints designed for the coffee table rather than the shelves, even a memorial beer. The original work is scarcely necessary, which seems a shame, because we need it more than ever.
These are tumultuous times. The country is on edge, unable to look away from what is going on in Washington. Hunter loved moments like this. The thing he hated the most was boredom, and no one is bored now. The thing he loved the most was politics, which continually disappointed him but which he couldn’t let go of. His great nemesis was Richard Nixon. Douglas Brinkley, a friend and historian, said, “Hunter hated Nixon so much he loved him.” In the Age of Trump, we’re all Hunter Thompson.
Hunter would have done more than relish the current scene; he would have realized how we got here. Indeed, he predicted it. After hanging out with the Hells Angels, the writer concluded that they were not “some romantic leftover” but “the first wave of a future that nothing in our history has prepared us to cope with.”
As he told Studs Terkel in 1967, the Angels were the vanguard of the masses rejected by technology, by progress, by history:
The people who are being left out and put behind won’t be obvious for years. And Christ only knows what’ll happen when it’s 1985. There will be a million Hell’s Angels. They won’t be wearing the colors but they’ll be people who are looking for vengeance because they’ve been left behind.
It took rather longer than Hunter thought, but that pretty much nails the millions of voters who put Trump over the top in 2016. There were so many more people out there looking for vengeance—social, personal, political, economic—than anyone realized.
American politics is always circling back to its past. The Trump/Clinton face-off has curious parallels to the 1972 election. Richard Nixon, Hunter noted, said the voting that year would offer “the clearest choice of this century.” Nixon was right but not in the way he meant.
“It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise,” Hunter wrote. “Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America’s answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close…”
Americans chose the dark side in 1972 and did so again in 2016. We like to go up to the edge, daring ourselves not to fall in. Hunter recognized the impulse because it was the same one he lived by. He insisted on amping things up, putting the entire bet on one role of the dice.
A favorite anecdote: somewhere in the early seventies, Rolling Stone writer David Felton went to visit Hunter at a California hotel. The inventor of Gonzo journalism “had a leer on his face and he was just slamming the door to his apartment as hard as he could, over and over again until it practically came off the hinges,” Felton told a biographer.
“He would slam it and then he would smile and open it; and he’d slam it again. It was because the guy upstairs complained about the noise. And Hunter’s theory on those things, which he’s done many times, is that if somebody complains about the noise you turn it up, not down, and they’ll stop complaining eventually.”
This was the reason why Hunter was placed on this earth: to make everyone realize how far you can go when you’re going too far. He was provocative without even trying. It’s a shame he never made it to Twitter. His quips—“I think having a favorite baseball team is like having a favorite oil company” is one of my favorites—would have launched a thousand flame wars.
But if Hunter is amazingly contemporary in some ways, in others he already seems as distant as Edith Wharton. Take, for instance, his love of drugs and alcohol.
The first time Hunter ever took LSD was during a legendary moment of the sixties, when the Hells Angels partied with Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and budding countercultural guru, and his Merry Prankster buddies. This happened in La Honda, a wooded community in the hills just south of San Francisco. Hunter was working on Hell’s Angels and made the introductions. The Pranksters, heavily into acid, offered some to the Angels. Hunter feared the worst—forty Angels unleashed!—and so naturally decided the only thing to do was to get fucked up himself.
An 800-microgram dose “almost blew my head off,” he said, but in a really good way. Hunter had heard stories about a psychiatrist who tripped “and wound up running naked through the streets of Palo Alto, screaming that he wanted to be punished for his crimes. He didn’t know what his crimes were and nobody else did, either, so they took him away and he spent a long time in a loony bin somewhere, and I thought, ‘That’s not what I need,’” he told Playboy.
His dark fear was that, if he lost control, “all these horrible psychic worms and rats would come out. But I went to the bottom of the well and found out there’s nothing down there I have to worry about.”
He was liberated. In his house in Woody Creek, Colorado, he pinned up this admonition: “Life should not be a journey to the grove with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid into the broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up and worn out and loudly proclaiming, ‘What a ride!’”
Here’s a paradox for you: even as the nation slouches toward legalization of marijuana—a drug, as it happens, that Hunter didn’t have much use for—the age of the wild writer is dead and buried. The only time anyone ever admits to getting ripped is in a recovery memoir. So no one will ever again write a book that opens like Las Vegas, with a full-throated yowl of exuberance:
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
The problem was that Hunter required extreme stimulus to do the work. He needed to feel his nerves tingling. “Your method of research is to tie yourself to a railroad track when you know a train is coming to it, and see what happens,” his editor, Jim Silberman, told him.
The result was that when the news dried up, so did he. In 1978, looking back a decade, he said, “There’s nothing that menacing and tangible to grab right now. I can recall almost all through the sixties, I’d wake up every morning in a black rage every time I saw a newspaper…Every time you turned around, the candidate you were counting on to save the world had his head blown off right in front of you…You had just a little bit of rest before someone else was killed.”
Ah, Hunter. People are being killed again on the streets. The world is a mess. Nixon was a model of restraint compared to the current occupant of the White House. Would that you were around to cover it.
I once spent many agonizing minutes watching Hunter Thompson, who liked to boast that he could use the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon, trying to sign his name.
This was in late 1990, in a hotel room in New York City. A publicist asked him to autograph his latest book before she left, a little souvenir of hours spent trying to get the writer to do the most basic things, like get out of bed. Hunter would start writing, get distracted, pause, gather his wits, stare at his hand as if it were an alien life form, throw something. I thought, Signed books by this guy must be really scarce.
A few decades later, with Gonzo nostalgia in full swing, eBay was auctioning a signed copy of Generation of Swine or Songs of the Doomed nearly every day, usually with just the scribbled letters “HST.” Collectors sometimes bid hundreds of dollars. Most of the autographs must be fake, but probably a few are real. At this point, who can tell the difference?
It’s been almost half a century since the work that made Hunter’s name and more than a decade since his suicide, but he was so controversial, so denounced, and so celebrated that the smoke still hasn’t cleared. He was influential and entertaining, everyone must give him that, but did he ever become the artist that he so palpably longed to be? Was he a madman, or was he a writer who played a role and got trapped in it? Did his prodigious intake of drugs and alcohol weaken his work, or make it possible in the first place? Like most of the great American writers, he did his best work first; is his life a tragedy of blown opportunities and persistent decline, or fundamentally a success?
Hunter himself was plagued by doubt, and other opinions were sharply divided. Tom Wolfe, who worked some of the same territory, called him “the greatest comic writer of the twentieth century.” But Hunter’s first wife, Sandy, who made his career possible in so many ways, said, “Hunter wanted to be a great writer and he had the genius, the talent, and, early on, the will and the means. He was horrified by whom he had become and ashamed—or I really should say tortured. He knew he had failed.”
That’s pretty harsh. Few writers achieve the hallowed groves of immortality, and those that do follow different roads. Hawthorne, Melville, Gabriel García Márquez, and Nabokov made it on their work alone. Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Kerouac all found that the stories they wrote merged with the story they lived, and so did Hunter. It happened gradually but inexorably. The first edition of Hell’s Angels from 1967 has a picture of a member of the biker gang on the cover. The Modern Library edition, printed thirty years later, bears a photo of Hunter, who always made clear he was not an Angel.
One of Hunter’s biographers, William McKeen, calls him “the favorite writer for many people who didn’t read books.” He stands in front of his work, often obscuring it. The books about him, including a half-dozen full-scale biographies, outnumber the books he wrote. There are movies (both Bill Murray and Johnny Depp played Hunter, not very successfully), documentaries, memoirs, comic books, lavish oversized reprints designed for the coffee table rather than the shelves, even a memorial beer. The original work is scarcely necessary, which seems a shame, because we need it more than ever.
These are tumultuous times. The country is on edge, unable to look away from what is going on in Washington. Hunter loved moments like this. The thing he hated the most was boredom, and no one is bored now. The thing he loved the most was politics, which continually disappointed him but which he couldn’t let go of. His great nemesis was Richard Nixon. Douglas Brinkley, a friend and historian, said, “Hunter hated Nixon so much he loved him.” In the Age of Trump, we’re all Hunter Thompson.
Hunter would have done more than relish the current scene; he would have realized how we got here. Indeed, he predicted it. After hanging out with the Hells Angels, the writer concluded that they were not “some romantic leftover” but “the first wave of a future that nothing in our history has prepared us to cope with.”
As he told Studs Terkel in 1967, the Angels were the vanguard of the masses rejected by technology, by progress, by history:
The people who are being left out and put behind won’t be obvious for years. And Christ only knows what’ll happen when it’s 1985. There will be a million Hell’s Angels. They won’t be wearing the colors but they’ll be people who are looking for vengeance because they’ve been left behind.
It took rather longer than Hunter thought, but that pretty much nails the millions of voters who put Trump over the top in 2016. There were so many more people out there looking for vengeance—social, personal, political, economic—than anyone realized.
American politics is always circling back to its past. The Trump/Clinton face-off has curious parallels to the 1972 election. Richard Nixon, Hunter noted, said the voting that year would offer “the clearest choice of this century.” Nixon was right but not in the way he meant.
“It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise,” Hunter wrote. “Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America’s answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close…”
Americans chose the dark side in 1972 and did so again in 2016. We like to go up to the edge, daring ourselves not to fall in. Hunter recognized the impulse because it was the same one he lived by. He insisted on amping things up, putting the entire bet on one role of the dice.
A favorite anecdote: somewhere in the early seventies, Rolling Stone writer David Felton went to visit Hunter at a California hotel. The inventor of Gonzo journalism “had a leer on his face and he was just slamming the door to his apartment as hard as he could, over and over again until it practically came off the hinges,” Felton told a biographer.
“He would slam it and then he would smile and open it; and he’d slam it again. It was because the guy upstairs complained about the noise. And Hunter’s theory on those things, which he’s done many times, is that if somebody complains about the noise you turn it up, not down, and they’ll stop complaining eventually.”
This was the reason why Hunter was placed on this earth: to make everyone realize how far you can go when you’re going too far. He was provocative without even trying. It’s a shame he never made it to Twitter. His quips—“I think having a favorite baseball team is like having a favorite oil company” is one of my favorites—would have launched a thousand flame wars.
But if Hunter is amazingly contemporary in some ways, in others he already seems as distant as Edith Wharton. Take, for instance, his love of drugs and alcohol.
The first time Hunter ever took LSD was during a legendary moment of the sixties, when the Hells Angels partied with Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and budding countercultural guru, and his Merry Prankster buddies. This happened in La Honda, a wooded community in the hills just south of San Francisco. Hunter was working on Hell’s Angels and made the introductions. The Pranksters, heavily into acid, offered some to the Angels. Hunter feared the worst—forty Angels unleashed!—and so naturally decided the only thing to do was to get fucked up himself.
An 800-microgram dose “almost blew my head off,” he said, but in a really good way. Hunter had heard stories about a psychiatrist who tripped “and wound up running naked through the streets of Palo Alto, screaming that he wanted to be punished for his crimes. He didn’t know what his crimes were and nobody else did, either, so they took him away and he spent a long time in a loony bin somewhere, and I thought, ‘That’s not what I need,’” he told Playboy.
His dark fear was that, if he lost control, “all these horrible psychic worms and rats would come out. But I went to the bottom of the well and found out there’s nothing down there I have to worry about.”
He was liberated. In his house in Woody Creek, Colorado, he pinned up this admonition: “Life should not be a journey to the grove with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid into the broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up and worn out and loudly proclaiming, ‘What a ride!’”
Here’s a paradox for you: even as the nation slouches toward legalization of marijuana—a drug, as it happens, that Hunter didn’t have much use for—the age of the wild writer is dead and buried. The only time anyone ever admits to getting ripped is in a recovery memoir. So no one will ever again write a book that opens like Las Vegas, with a full-throated yowl of exuberance:
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
The problem was that Hunter required extreme stimulus to do the work. He needed to feel his nerves tingling. “Your method of research is to tie yourself to a railroad track when you know a train is coming to it, and see what happens,” his editor, Jim Silberman, told him.
The result was that when the news dried up, so did he. In 1978, looking back a decade, he said, “There’s nothing that menacing and tangible to grab right now. I can recall almost all through the sixties, I’d wake up every morning in a black rage every time I saw a newspaper…Every time you turned around, the candidate you were counting on to save the world had his head blown off right in front of you…You had just a little bit of rest before someone else was killed.”
Ah, Hunter. People are being killed again on the streets. The world is a mess. Nixon was a model of restraint compared to the current occupant of the White House. Would that you were around to cover it.
