The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (41 page)

During breaks from the story, he tapped out incidents from the Vegas trip on his IBM Selectric typewriter to keep himself sane. With the Rolling Stones’ album
Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!
blaring from his stereo, Thompson summoned the words easily; it was pleasurable, not like work. One paragraph became a page, then ten pages. By the last week of April, Thompson had written more than two thousand words on the Vegas trip. He turned in the manuscript to
Sports Illustrated’s
Tom Vanderschmidt, who summarily rejected it. He couldn’t even extrapolate any captions out of the manuscript; it was of no use to the magazine. “Your call was the key to a massive freak-out,” he wrote to Vanderschmidt. “The result is still up in the air, and still climbing. When you see the final fireball, remember that it was all your fault.”

He decided to try his luck at
Rolling Stone
. “We were supposed to meet about the Salazar piece,” said editor David Felton. “Hunter walks into my place with this paper in his hand and starts reading from the Vegas story. He was obviously very excited about it.” Felton got excited too and Hunter forwarded the manuscript to
RS
editor John Scanlon and Jann Wenner, who upon reading it demanded that Thompson keep going.

But there was always the matter of scraping up enough money to keep going. A deal was also struck with Random House to publish the
article in book form, with the proviso that Thompson write more material. Thompson eventually sold the project to Jim Silberman for a $100,000 advance and then drove back to Vegas (in a white Cadillac this time) to observe the National District Attorneys’ Association conference on narcotics and dangerous drugs, which was scheduled to start on April 26. After that he returned to Woody Creek and tried to make sense of all he had seen and wrecked in Nevada.

Thompson invoked the rebel spirit of Kerouac when he sat down to write the rest of
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
in the cramped guest bedroom at Owl Farm that he called the “war room.” The title was a play on Danish philosopher S⊘ren Kierkegaard’s book
Fear and Trembling
, though Thompson always denied it. “Kerouac taught me that you could get away with writing about drugs and get published,” he told the
Paris Review
in a 2000 interview. “Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer … in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.”

In
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
, Thompson, like Kerouac, cloaked real events in a mythic realm where the verisimilitude of journalism encounters the juiced-up rhetorical style that had become his trademark. It was journalism as bricolage: Thompson moved around freely in space and time, moving from internal acid monologues to brittle comic scenes, contrasting the high times on Parnassus Avenue in San Francisco with the gold-lamé depravity of Vegas, always searching in vain for the American dream. One morning, his friend and house guest Lucian K. Truscott IV came in at 1 A.M. and found Hunter pounding away. “What are you working on?” Truscott asked. Thompson handed him some pages; Truscott approved. “I don’t know,” Hunter said. “I’m just going to keep writing until it makes sense.”

But if
gonzo
can roughly be defined as a provocation on the reporter’s part to drive the story forward, then
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
doesn’t exactly qualify. Acosta, as the manic, drug-ingesting Dr. Gonzo, is the driver of the story—a character of boundless energy and unrestrained temperament, testing every situation to the breaking point, a 300-pound Samoan with a severe amyl nitrate habit and a tendency to light up his hash pipe in public.

Thompson is Raoul Duke, an amalgam (derived from Fidel Castro’s brother and John Wayne’s nickname) that he had used in a
Scanlan’s
story the previous year. Throughout the book, Thompson/Duke finds himself trying to negotiate a way out of the awful predicaments Acosta/Dr. Gonzo creates. Dr. Gonzo is a great Falstaffian force of nature, Raoul Duke his bemused foil.

“Certainly many of the character traits that Dr. Gonzo posesses had parallels to my dad,” said Marco Acosta. “He wasn’t Samoan, of course, but in the Samoan culture, the men tend to be large, and Hunter was trying to invoke my dad’s dominant physical presence. There are many aspects of him that you don’t see, but Hunter’s goal was to be funny first and foremost.”

Thompson wasted little time kick-starting his story into motion. From
Fear and Loathing’s
very first line, Thompson and Acosta are on the move, in search of … well, who knows what.

The ostensible objective is a journey to Vegas to report on the Mint 400, but as in
On the Road
, the journey is the point. Raoul Duke wants to revel in the great gift of freedom that all Americans share; the Vegas trip was a “a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic
possibilities
of life in this country—but only for those with true grit.”

True grit, just like John “Duke” Wayne himself. But there was no wild frontier to explore in the West, just a “cluster of grey rectangles in the distance, rising out of the cactus.” The sixties notion of a new age of enlightenment in the West, glimpses of which Thompson had encountered in San Francisco, had never taken root, “burned out and long gone from the brutish realities of this foul year of Our Lord, 1971.” The Mojave Desert, the West’s last untouched frontier, had been colonized by the greed-mongers, and nobody at the keno tables seemed bothered
by the rising body count in Vietnam. For Sal Paradise/Kerouac, the characters on his cross-country trip are an affirmation of the beatitude and bedrock virtue of the underclass; the freak parade of humanity that Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo encounters is merely bestial and overfed on excess.

Raoul Duke/Thompson’s cognitive dissonance in Vegas is most acute when he and Dr. Gonzo attend the National District Attorneys’ Association conference on narcotics and dangerous drugs in the ballroom of the Dunes Hotel. Thompson, who was registered as an accredited journalist for the event, ducked out to score mescaline from a Vegas contact, only to return to a ballroom of fifteen hundred vehemently antidrug cops loudly deriding the use of controlled substances:

Thompson eventually does find the American dream, but it’s been corrupted beyond recognition. Manifest Destiny is just a money grab now—drunk tourists in Vegas amusing themselves to death, throwing their money into a rabbit hole, where it is retrieved by greedy casino owners. As for the counterculture, it has been beaten into submission by a heavy load of drugs: “All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too.” The dream was over, and there was no turning back now.

David Felton regarded the story as a eulogy for the dashed hopes of the sixties: “I think he saw the generation as falling apart long before
most of us who were still trying to be practicing members. It was pure inspiration.”

In a letter to Tom Wolfe that accompanied the first part of the story, Thompson explained his objectives:

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
was the greatest achievement thus far of Thompson’s fifteen-year career; with Wenner, he had found a sympathetic editor who gave him the space to push the throttle all the way and develop a “mindwarp/photo technique” that resulted in a new voice—antic, lysergic, blackly humorous, gently moralizing. Published in two parts in the November 11 and November 25 issues of
Rolling Stone
and illustrated with garish slash-and-burn ink drawings from Ralph Steadman, it created a huge stir among readers and envy from his peers. “I just thought it was phenomonally good,” said Tim Ferris. “Something like that doesn’t come along too often. It just had a bombshell effect.”

William Kennedy, Thompson’s old Puerto Rico running buddy, thought of it as a “totally original piece of work. It was so over the top, the result of morphing his fictional aspirations into his journalism.” Tom Wolfe, whom Thompson regarded as his closest competitor, declared it a masterpiece of New Journalism, a “scorching, epochal sensation.”

It should have been time for some well-earned gloating, but with critical approbation came a number of complications. First and foremost was the matter of recompense for the piece. Aside from the initial $300 that
Sports Illustrated
had forwarded him, Thompson had laid out the rest of the expense money for both Vegas trips on credit cards, an amount exceeding $2,000. When Thompson, in a frantic telegram from the Flamingo Hotel, had begged Wenner to send along some money, he received $500—but that was just his monthly retainer, as it turned out. The expense money would have to be absorbed by the story fee. “I think the thing to do is for you to
lend
me the 1K-plus to pay off Carte
Blanche,” Thompson wrote in a letter to Wenner. “Fuck. Maybe I should. I’ll never deny the thing was excessive. But I don’t recall spending anything, out there, that didn’t strike me as being
necessary at the time
. But this is a hard thing to argue or defend, it drags us into the realm of the preternatural.”

Acosta wasn’t getting paid a dime for providing all of that fodder for Thompson’s story, which was all well and good until he read the piece. Being classified as a slovenly Samoan didn’t sit well with him, and when the story was published in book form, he threatened a libel suit against both Thompson and Random House for defamation of character.

Thompson was baffled. He had thought he was doing the right thing—protecting his friend by using a pseudonym. But Acosta, who constantly feared disbarment and worried about how the story might affect his already shaky legal career, wasn’t having any of it, especially since the book carried a back-cover photo of Thompson and Acosta in Caesar’s Palace, sitting at a table strewn with drink glasses. “I’ve been mistaken for American Indian, Spanish, Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan and Arabian,” Acosta wrote in his book
The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo
. “No one has ever asked me if I’m a spic or a greaser. Am I Samoan? Aren’t we all? I groan.”

Acosta made a deal with Alan Rinzler, the publisher of
Rolling Stone’s
book division, Straight Arrow: he would sign a waiver that dropped all liability claims against Random House in exchange for a two-book deal with Straight Arrow. The
Fear and Loathing
photograph, which had been a sore point for him, now was a prerequisite—the first Acosta book had to include the picture, so readers would know exactly who he was.

With all legal threats out of the way, Thompson was free to enjoy his good fortune.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
eventually sold millions of copies, and Thompson could finally cool off a bit on the relentless hustling for assignments, perhaps even take on another big writing project: the upcoming presidential election, in which the incumbent, Nixon, would perhaps finally have to pay the piper for all of his malfeasance and double-dealing across his long political career. The hippie dream may have died on the craps tables at Caesar’s Palace, but if Nixon was defeated, there was still a shred of hope for everyone.

FUN WITH DICK AND GEORGE

I
n December 1971
Rolling Stone
held an editorial confab at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. The ostensible purpose of the conference was to brainstorm ideas and plot strategy for the magazine; the unspoken agenda involved ingesting prodigious amounts of booze and weed. Jann Wenner had one key talking point for the conference: he wanted Hunter Thompson to cover the 1972 presidential campaign for the magazine, and not just the conventions—every primary from New Hampshire to the Republican and Democratic conventions in Miami, an eight-month reporting marathon.