The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (40 page)

Wenner was most interested in fresh voices—writers who were inexperienced and hungry, outcast freaks and former dope dealers with a flair for story structure, news veterans who had been beaten down by endless eight-hundred-word dispatches for late-edition deadlines. Recruiting Hunter S. Thompson would be a feather in his cap; here was an established author with a best-selling book under his belt, a master of the long-form story who had lost a crucial outlet with the demise of
Scanlan’s
and was eager to fill the void quickly. “I wanted Hunter to write for
Rolling Stone
from the beginning,” said Wenner.

Now Wenner had an assignment for Thompson: the obituary of Hell’s Angel Freewheeling Frank. Alas, Thompson was too busy to do it, immersed as he was with the Aspen sheriff’s campaign. Thompson had vowed that he would run for the office if Joe Edwards won his mayoral campaign. Edwards wound up losing by six votes, a margin that made the writer think he just might have a chance if he ran. Wenner told him to write about that.

“The Battle of Aspen” ran in the October 1, 1970,
Rolling Stone
and was a discursive and riotous account of the two Aspen campaigns. There was no question that Thompson had found a perfect vehicle for his turbocharged prose; even though he studiously avoided writing about rock explicitly, his flair for the gleefully subversive made him a natural ally of Wenner’s publication. “It wasn’t too difficult editing Hunter on that story,” recalled Wenner. “He was far more resilient and easier to deal with in those days. I remember it being a fairly spontaneous affair.”

The other staffers at
Rolling Stone
weren’t so sure about Thompson. “None of us really knew what to think of Hunter at first,” said former
Rolling Stone
copy editor Charles Perry. “I remember the first time I saw him in person. He was coming into the office to work with [editor] John Lombardi on a story, and he had this big box of hats and wigs with him. He would just keep changing into these wigs and hats every few minutes. John found this puzzling and somewhat disturbing. He quit a few weeks later.” Fortunately for
Rolling Stone
, Wenner knew how to handle the writer. “Hunter needed an apocalypse going on all the time,” he said. “But the writing was absolutely electric, and it was tremendous fun working and hanging around with him. I was resilient enough to handle him, but a lot of people were brutalized by him.”

Thompson’s next story for
Rolling Stone
would come from an old drinking buddy, a civil rights lawyer he had met through a mutual friend, Ketchum, Ohio, bar owner Mike Solheim. Like Thompson, Oscar Zeta Acosta was an Air Force veteran. After being honorably discharged, Acosta attended Modesto Junior College, near his hometown of Riverbank, a small, rural central California town that would eventually be gerrymandered into Modesto. The objective for Acosta was to distance himself from the minimum-wage drudgery that his father, Manuel, had endured for so long as a janitor, but just what that entailed, Acosta wasn’t quite sure. At least a proper education would give him a leg up. He had literary aspirations, but despite a ferocious commitment to writing, including an unpublished novel, Acosta was unable to sell anything.

Following a short stint at San Francisco State University, Acosta enrolled in San Francisco Law School and struggled mightily to pass the bar, succeeding on his second attempt in 1966. But providing expensive counsel for corporate fat cats was anathema to Acosta. It was highly unlikely that any white-shoe law firm would hire him anyway; Acosta was a heavy user of LSD and other psychoactive drugs, which he felt were gateways to self-realization. “I think psychedelic drugs have been important to the development of my consciousness,” Acosta wrote in an unpublished essay. “They’ve put me into a level of awareness where I can see myself and see what I’m really doing.” As a Chicano growing up near the San Joaquin Valley, that vast agricultural expanse in central California in which most of America’s produce is harvested, Acosta was well
aware of the exploitation of immigrant laborers by white landowners, the brazen injustices imposed on illiterate workers who had no legal recourse. He would make it his business to help the disenfranchised among his people.

After a short stint working as a lawyer for the East Oakland Legal Aid Society, Acosta moved to Los Angeles in 1968, where the Chicano civil rights movement, known as El Movimiento, was gaining momentum. His brother Bob tipped him off to a large Brown Berets protest in L.A., and Acosta was intrigued by this Latino analogue to the Black Panthers. He was worn down by the workload and the menial pay of his Legal Aid job. His ambitions were too outsized for a civil service job, anyway. Armed with a bar license, Acosta wanted nothing more than to help foment a Chicano revolution. “Whenever he set out to do something, he went at it with full force,” said Acosta’s son Marco. “But he was never satisfied with any one thing.”

During the next six years in L.A., Acosta was the legal point man for virtually every significant civil rights case regarding Chicano activists. In late 1968 he defended thirteen protesters who were indicted for conspiracy to disrupt the public school system after a teacher walkout. In 1969 he defended the Biltmore Seven, a clutch of radicals who were arrested for trying to firebomb the Biltmore Hotel while Governor Ronald Reagan was giving a speech inside. To Acosta, guilt or innocence was beside the point; due process should be accorded to anyone who had to defend him- or herself in a court of law. He became the Latino equivalent of white civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, who had defended the Chicago Seven in the wake of the violent clashes between cops and protesters at the 1968 Democratic convention.

Acosta first encountered Thompson just prior to his Los Angeles move, during a 1967 trip to Aspen. Beset by a chronic ulcer and distraught over the death of his secretary, Acosta was tipped off by his client John Tibeau to a cure located somewhere in Aspen, and hoped to relocate there and restore himself to health. But that didn’t deter him from drinking. When he came into town, Mike Solheim arranged a meeting between Acosta and Thompson at the Daisy Duke bar. Dressed in chino shorts and an L. L. Bean sailor’s cap with a bowie knife holstered to his waist, Thompson struck Acosta as a willful eccentric with a nasty contrarian streak. Thompson, for his part, didn’t know what to
make of Acosta either, but indifference certainly wasn’t an option. As the booze flowed, Acosta became more animated and energized, loudly enumerating the ways in which he was going to redress America’s racial inequities and bring down the
gabachos
who had oppressed his people (Charles Perry said that Acosta “talked much the same way Hunter wrote”). Thompson couldn’t follow everything that Acosta was telling him—the latter’s speech came in rapid-fire bursts—but he was certain he had found a kindred spirit. The fact that Tibeau had broken his leg while riding on Hunter’s BSA motorcycle was broached and quickly forgotten.

“I recognized in Oscar [someone] who would push things one more notch toward the limit,” said Thompson. “You never knew with Oscar what was going to happen next.” They became brothers in arms, fellow troublemakers with a mutual disregard for propriety and authority. One night Thompson and Acosta dropped acid and went to the Whiskey a Go-Go in Hollywood, the hottest club on the Sunset Strip. As the music droned on and drug-induced psychosis began to set in, Thompson persuaded Acosta that the singer on stage was a lip-syncing fraud. At first incredulous, Acosta slowly began to buy into Thompson’s bogus claim, until he finally stormed the stage and demanded that the band stop the sham at once. When they refused, Acosta reared back and punched the lead singer in the jaw.

Acosta and Thompson became fast friends, tying one on whenever they found themselves in the same city. In the winter of 1970, Acosta tipped off Thompson to the story of Ruben Salazar, a Chicano reporter for the
Los Angeles Times
who had been killed by an LAPD tear gas shell in an East Los Angeles restaurant during a civil rights protest. Although the death was officially ruled an accident by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Acosta and others felt that Salazar, an outspoken critic of the L.A. police and mayor Sam Yorty, had been intentionally killed, the investigation of his murder a clumsy coverup. Thompson pitched the story to
Scanlan’s
and, using Acosta as his guide, went down to L.A. to conduct interviews. But when Sidney Zion rejected the piece (along with Thompson’s $1,200 fee), Thompson sold it to
Rolling Stone
, with the proviso that Thompson would update the story and clarify some confusion in the timeline of the narrative.

Thompson moved to L.A., setting himself up in a fleabag hotel in East L.A. Racial tension in the city had spilled over into violence; the
LAPD reported scattered instances of hate crimes, and Acosta, a vocal critic of the Salazar investigation who had organized a protest outside the L.A. coroner’s office, was now surrounded by amateur bodyguards to protect him from his enemies during public appearances. Thompson, who had endured the knife-edge hostility of the Hell’s Angels and had traveled to some of the world’s most dangerous places for stories, now found himself surrounded by a pincer movement of angry Mexicans whenever he encountered Acosta. It was one of the few times in his career where he felt that physical harm was actually imminent.

In order to separate Acosta from his phalanx of thugs, Thompson suggested they book a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel in order to discuss the Salazar case. But the metallic clang of jewelry on the dainty wrists of matrons lunching at the Polo Lounge was not quite the ambience Thompson was looking for. He had a better idea.

Tom Vanderschmidt, a senior editor at
Sports Illustrated
and an old friend from the
National Observer
days, had called up Thompson a week earlier to determine his availability for a story. The magazine needed a writer to provide accompanying text for a photo spread about a motorcycle race called the Mint 400, a rally sponsored by Del Webb’s Mint Hotel in Las Vegas. Thompson initially hemmed and hawed, thinking that another assignment would compromise the complex Salazar story. But Vegas had always appealed to him as a potential story subject, and now he surmised that a trip there would be a great excuse for him and Acosta to distance themselves for a while from the madness in Los Angeles, grab some R&R, and get paid for it to boot.

Thompson approached the assignment much like he approached every other story—by the seat of his pants. No hotel reservations, no press credentials—just expense money and a vague mandate to report on what he witnessed at the race. Acosta rented a Chrysler convertible and acquired a prodigious supply of mescaline, speed, and booze, and Thompson pointed the car east toward the desert.

Jack Kerouac was in Hunter’s head when he pressed his foot to the accelerator of the rented wheels, heading east on Interstate 15. Kerouac’s books—
On the Road, Visions of Cody, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums—
were thinly veiled memoirs of an existential life in which mad sensation counted for more than reason. Kerouac’s colloquial prose bounced across the page like a Charlie Parker solo; it was all sinewy brawn and
earthy spontaneity. The trick was to steer clear of complacency and plunge headlong into the vortex of unreason, where life was truly, exuberantly lived.

Thompson internalized Kerouac’s worldview with a close reading of the books, particularly
On the Road
, and he wanted his writing to resonate with that same flailing passion. The Vegas trip with Acosta would just be a continuation of his own antihero’s journey, which commenced with the Hell’s Angels and continued at the Kentucky Derby, the America’s Cup, and the campaigns in Aspen. Thompson wanted to be this generation’s Kerouac.

Like those earlier misadventures, Thompson knew the Vegas assignment certainly wasn’t going to be a who-what-when-where reporting job. It couldn’t be, with Thompson and Acosta running roughshod through Las Vegas. To ensure that events and scenes wouldn’t be lost to the half-lit memories of a marathon drug binge, Thompson carried a notebook and a tape recorder with him at all times, recording every conversation with strangers, croupiers, cocktail waitresses. He hadn’t the foggiest notion if his fieldwork would amount to anything, but Thompson had always been a conscientious collector of his own data, however haphazard his gathering methods might have been.

The Mint 400 was being held on a giant spit of dirt track that turned into a dust cloud when the race commenced. It was impossible to follow and just plain boring from a journalism standpoint. After wrangling mightily for press credentials and securing a driver to help him keep tabs on the racers, Thompson quickly abandoned the Mint 400 altogether.

Recklessly driving the convertible down Las Vegas Boulevard, Acosta and Thompson ducked in and out of various casinos with the observant dispatch of bomb sweepers, marveling at the downcast midway attractions at Circus Circus, then crashing a Debbie Reynolds performance at the Desert Inn. “Hunter came into Circus Circus when I was performing in the bar,” said musician and friend Bruce Innes. “He wanted to see if he could buy one of the chimps from the Flying Wallendas. Alas, they wouldn’t sell one to him.”

“Hunter would call me up from Vegas, and there would be all this commotion,” said
Rolling Stone
editor David Felton, who had been assigned to work on the Salazar story. “He would be yelling into the phone, ‘David, Oscar’s out of control, I don’t know what to do.’ I’d hear
all these strange noises in the background, things breaking and crashing to the floor. I think they were high, but I also think it was an act for my benefit. Hunter liked to push things, but only to a point.”

After a few days in Vegas, Thompson and Acosta skipped out on their hotel bill, which had snowballed to $2,000, and gunned it back to L.A. The Vegas trip had temporarily delayed Thompson’s work on the Salazar story, and he was past his deadline. There was also the matter of writing a short piece for
Sports Illustrated
, but, having missed the race, he had little to write about. Thompson checked into a Ramada Inn near Felton’s Pasadena apartment and tried to fashion a Salazar piece based on the information Acosta had provided. Keeping himself awake for days on end with a prodigious supply of speed, Thompson struggled with the complexities of the case, which folded issues of racism and class conflict within the context of a byzantine court case. It was the most complicated story of his career, and he struggled to make it something worthwhile.