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Gonzo: The Life And Work Of

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax—This won't hurt. – The last words Hunter S. Thompson found on his typewriter

We could sail through the stars, figure out the secrets of the gnome, travel through wormholes, touch the face of God and the bedrock of humanity will still be stories, the telling of tales about who we are and what the world around us is like. While the yarns have changed and developed more sophisticated, it is the root that ties us to our caveman ancestors whose children looked up at the starry night and ask how it got there, what happens when they die, and why they were a special people. Those storytellers who alter how we see ourselves are few and far between and one of them is Hunter S. Thompson, one of my heroes.

In 2nd grade, I discovered that girls were pretty cool. Soon after, I realized that they didn’t think the same thing of me. In 3rd grade, I got my first Beatles album and spun that disk until the groove almost disappeared. I was ten when I got behind the wheel of a pickup truck for the first time and cruised down the highway, fields, and gravel roads surrounding our home. A few days later my friend Tim Peterson handed me my first beer out of an “out of service” pop machine in a run down auto repair shop. A handful of years later, my best friend’s mom bought all the laser disks out off a hotel that was going out of business. It was my introduction to grind house cinema. The blood, the violence, and the naked women, all things you never saw on the streets of my home town. The same year I was handed a tattered copy of a book called Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs by Hunter Stockton Thompson. It was the kind of book your English teacher and parents didn’t want you to have, dangerous and enticing, a literary siren beckoning you with its forbidden knowledge and words that leaped off the page. Drugs, chains, motorcycles, unkempt men in leather jackets, fists, knifes, all ending in a bloody beating of the man writing the work What was there not to love. On its heels I read The Gonzo Papers, Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail ’72, The Curse of Lono, and The Rum Diary. Keeping these tattered works hidden under the mattress of my waterbed, the black letters dripped with a passion not found in the Lake Wobegon Norwegian world I grew up in. It was my first experience with gonzo journalism, which means a form of reporting that is extreme or shows reckless abandon in its style, the kind of information and insights you never found in your hometown newspaper. I didn’t know what I wanted to be, but whatever energy crackled on those pages, I wanted to be that. In the privacy of my room, I remember secretly copying by hand paragraph after paragraph, trying to unlock the secrets of his style. To this day, I can still see the influence of Hunter on everything I write, as can almost every writer in the last three decades. This column is a redheaded stepson of Dr. Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, the oldest of three sons, Hunter’s dad, Jack, died when Hunter was a teenager, leaving the three boys at the mercy of their alcoholic mother. At 19, he was arrested for robbery. The young man made a deal with the courts to join the air force instead of doing time. In Florida, at Eglin Air Force Base, Thompson found what he was supposed to do with his life. He began to do a sports column for the base newspaper and was soon moonlighting for various local newspapers, against regulations. Two years later, in 1958, he was discharged. Hunter soon enrolled at Columbia University where he took classes on short story writing, but mainly seemed to enjoy the night life of New York City. During this period, he got a job working as a copyboy for Time Magazine. While on Time’s dime, Hunter typed out Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to figure out these master’s writing styles. A year later, Hunter got a job at the Middletown Daily Record in upstate New York, from which he was promptly fired for damaging a candy machine and getting in an argument with a local restaurant owner who placed ads in the paper. The beginning of the 1960s found him in San Juan, Puerto Rico, doing a sports column for El Sportivo, which promptly folded. He then tried to make a living as a freelancer, detailing what was happening in the Caribbean and South America for various newspapers. Less than a year later, the father of gonzo journalism found himself working as a security guard at the Big Sur Hot Springs, which became the Esalen Institute while he worked for them. During this time, Thompson wrote two novels, Prince Jellyfish and The Rum Diary, and several short stories, all of which were rejected by several publishers. Not only did Hunter’s career appear to be going nowhere, but his marriage to Sandra Dawn Conklin suffered its own share of sorrows. Of her six pregnancies, only one, their son, Juan Fitzgerald Thompson, did not end in a miscarriage. Hunter’s big break finally occurred in 1965 when The Nation editor Carey McWilliams approached him about doing a piece on the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. Thompson would spend the next year with them. Things went south between Hunter and the gang when the bikers got wind that Hunter was making money from writing about them and they wanted a cut. They beat him within an inch of his life. With the publication of The Nation piece, Hunter was besieged with numerous offers to turn the article into a book. The result was Hells Angels in 1966. Dr. Gonzo went on to work for Rolling Stone magazine, from which his next two books, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Loathing on the Campaign Trail were serialized. His Las Vegas book detailed his trip to Sin City to cover a narcotics officers’ convention and motorcycle race with his Samoan attorney. The trip was an orgy of illegal drugs. His next book covered the 1972 general election between President Richard M. Nixon and his Democratic opponent, George McGovern. About the only one who came off well in the book was McGovern. Hunter turned into one of Nixon’s biggest critics. He considered Nixon the worst President in his lifetime until the Presidency of a gentleman he first met passed out in the great journalist’s bathtub, George W. Bush. Hunter is also famous for another article in Rolling Stone which detailed his efforts to run for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, an election he barely lost in spite of the fact that he urged the decriminalization of drugs, want to tear up the streets and turn them into bike paths, and rename Aspen, “Fat City.” Hunter finished off his career with one last book, Kingdom of Fear, and wrote a sports column for ESPN on the web entitled “Hey Rube,” which was compiled into a book.

Hunter was a fond of drugs and guns, and both in great volumes. Even Paris Hilton is smart enough to do the math and know that this is not a good equation. On February 20, 2005, he killed himself. Six months later in typical Hunter S. Thompson style, at a private funeral service attended by friends like Johnny Depp, Lyle Lovett, John Oates, John Kerry, George McGovern, Sean Penn, Ed Bradley, and Bill Murray, Hunter’s ashes were mixed with fireworks and fired from a cannon of his own design. The whole ceremony was financed by Depp, who has brought two of Hunter’s works to the silver screen (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and later this year The Rum Diary).

‘Who cares about Hunter Thompson?,” I can hear some drunk coed bellow. We live in his gonzo world of instant feedback, blogging, and text messaging. Howard Stern, Seymour Butts, Britney Spears, and Dog the Bounty Hunter are all Thompson’s cultural children. Formality in our print and visual media has almost disappeared. Our movies, pornography, television, and even our churches and politicians have become more gonzo. The distance between subject and perceiver has shrunk. The concepts of privacy and shame among teenagers have almost vanished. It is Hunter Thompson’s world. Too bad he is not around to enjoy it.

Verdict: Try To Discover Who Hunter S. Thompson Was.