The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

by Hunter S. Thompson

  And so much for all that. . . I have all of 1972 to fuck around with Nixon, so why hassle it here?

  Anyway, the main point I want to make about Fear & Loathing is that although it's not what I meant it to be, it's still so complex in its failure that I feel I can take the risk of defending it as a first, gimped effort in a direction that what Tom Wolfe calls "The New Journalism" has been flirting with for almost a decade.

  Wolfe's problem is that he's too crusty to participate in his stories. The people he feels comfortable with are dull as stale dogshit, and the people who seem to fascinate him as a writer are so weird that they make him nervous. The only thing new and unusual about Wolfe's journalism is that he's an abnormally good reporter; he has a fine sense of echo and at least a peripheral understanding of what John Keats was talking about when he said that thing about Truth & Beauty. The only reason Wolfe seems "new" is because William Randolph Hearst bent the spine of American journalism very badly when it was just getting started. All Tom Wolfe did -- after he couldn't make it on the Washington Post and couldn't even get hired by the National Observer -- was to figure out that there was really not much percentage in playing the old Colliers' game, and that if he was ever going to make it in "journalism," his only hope was to make it on his own terms: By being good in the classical -- rather than the contemporary -- sense, and by being the kind of journalist that the American print media honor mainly in the breach. Or, failing that, at the funeral. Like Stephen Crane, who couldn't even get a copyboy's job on today's New York Times. The only difference between working for the Times and Time magazine is the difference between being a third-string All-American fullback at Yale instead of Ohio State.

  And again, yes, we seem to be rambling -- so perhaps I should close this off.

  The only other important thing to be said about Fear & Loathing at this time is that it was fun to write, and that's rare -- for me, at least, because I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.

  Nothing is fun when you have to do it -- over & over, again & again -- or else you'll be evicted, and that gets old. So it's a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig that, even in retrospect, was a kinghell, highlife fuckaround from start to finish. . . and then to actually get paid for writing this kind of maniac gibberish seems genuinely weird; like getting paid for kicking Agnew in the balls.

  So maybe there's hope. Or maybe I'm going mad. These are not easy things to be sure of, either way. . . and in the meantime we have this failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism, the certain truth of which will never be established. That much is definite. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas will have to be chalked off as a frenzied experiment, a fine idea that went crazy about halfway through. . . a victim of its own conceptual schizophrenia, caught & finally crippled in that vain, academic limbo between "journalism" & "fiction." And then hoist on its own petard of multiple felonies and enough flat-put crime to put anybody who'd admit to this kind of stinking behavior in the Nevada State Prison until 1984.

  So now, in closing, I want to thank everybody who helped me put this happy work of fiction together. Names are not necessary here; they know who they are -- and in this foul era of Nixon, that knowledge and private laughter is probably the best we can hope for. The line between martyrdom and stupidity depends on a certain kind of tension in the body politic -- but that line disappeared, in America, at the trial of the "Chicago 7/8," and there is no point in kidding ourselves, now, about Who Has the Power.

  In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile -- and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep. . . but we owe it especially to, our children, who will have to live with our loss and all its long-term consequences. I don't want my son asking me, in 1984, why his friends are calling me a "Good German."

  Which gets down to a final point about Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. I have called it, only half sarcastically, "a vile epitaph for the Drug Culture of the Sixties," and I think it is. This whole twisted saga is a sort of Atavistic Endeavor, a dream-trip into the past -- however recent -- that was only half successful. I think we both understood, all along, that we were running a hell of a risk by laying a sixties trip on Las Vegas in 1971. . . and that neither one of us would ever pass this way again.

  So we pushed it as far as we could, and we survived -- which means something, I guess, but not much beyond a good story and now, having done it, written it, and humping a reluctant salute to that decade that started so high and then went so brutally sour, I don't see much choice but to lash down the screws and get on with what has to be done. Either that or do nothing at all -- fall back on the Good German, Panicked Sheep syndrome, and I don't think I'm ready for that. At least not right now.

  Because it was nice to be loose and crazy with a good credit card in a time when it was possible to run totally wild in Las Vegas and then get paid for writing a book about it. . . and it occurs to me that I probably just made it, just under the wire and the deadline. Nobody will dare admit this kind of behavior in print if Nixon wins again in '72.

  The Swine are gearing down for a serious workout this time around. Four more years of Nixon means four more years of John Mitchell -- and four more years of Mitchell means another decade or more of bureaucratic fascism that will be so entrenched, by 1976, that nobody will feel up to fighting it. We will feel too old by then, too beaten, and by then even the Myth of the Road will be dead -- if only for lack of exercise. There will not be any wild-eyed, dope-sucking anarchists driving around the country in fireapple red convertibles if Nixon wins again in '72.

  There will not even be any convertibles, much less any dope. And all the anarchists will be locked up in rehabilitation pens. The internaional hotel-chain lobby will ram a bill thru congress, setting mandatory death penalties for anyone jumping a hotel bill -- and death by castration & whipping if the deed is done in Vegas. The only legal high will be supervised Chinese acupuncture, in government hospitals at $200 a day -- with Martha Mitchell as Secretary of Health, Education & Welfare, operating out of a luxurious penthouse on top of the Walter Reed Army Hospital.

  So much, then, for The Road -- and for the last possibilities of running amok in Las Vegas & living to tell the tale. But maybe we won't really miss it. Maybe Law & Order is really the best way to go, after all.

  Yeah. . . maybe so, and if that's the way it happens. . . well, at least I'll know I was there, neck deep in the madness, before the deal went down, and I got so high and wild that I felt like a two-ton Manta Ray jumping all the way across the Bay of Bengal.

  It was a good way to go, and I recommend it highly -- at least for those who can stand the trip. And for those who can't, or won't, there is not much else to say. Not now, and certainly not by me, or Raoul Duke either. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas marks the end of an era. . . and now, on this fantastic Indian summer morning in the Rockies, I want to leave this noisy black machine and sit naked on my porch for a while, in the sun.

  Previously unpublished

  A Conversation on Ralph Steadman and His Book,

  America, with Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

  HST: I'm sitting here looking at Ralph's book. It's terrible a really rotten thing to publish. . .

  ED.: What's wrong with it?

  HST: It's embarrassing. I hate to go into the details. This scatological scene here, with sex organs and things. . .

  ED.: You've worked with Ralph Steadman quite a bit, Dr. Thompson. Some of the material in this book came out of assignments and trips you made together. How did you two hook up in the first place?

  HST: Ah, let's see. . . I ran into him at the Kentucky Derby in May of 1969. I had been looking around for an artist to go the Derby with me. I called Warren Hinckle, the edi
tor at Scanlan's, and said, "We need somebody with a really peculiar sense of humor, because this is going to be a very twisted story. It'll require somebody with a serious kink in his brain." So Hinckle thought for a while and said, "I know just the person for you. He's never been published over here before. His name is Ralph Steadman, he works for Private Eye in London and we'll get him over there right away." So I went down there thinking that whatever showed up would be pretty hard to cope with.

  Ralph was a day late; he checked into the wrong room, at the wrong hotel. . . this was his first visit to this country, by the way, the Kentucky Derby. He's had four basic reasons for coming to this country, which might explain something about the nature of the drawings in this book. His first visit was for the Kentucky Derby in 1969. . . he hadn't been here before that. His second gig -- also for Scanlan's -- was the America's Cup yacht race at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1970. The third was the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami for Rolling Stone. And the fourth was the Watergate hearings in Washington in the summer of '73. He went to a few other places in conjunction with those trips -- places like Dallas, Disneyland, Santa Fe -- but those were mainly side trips. The assignments that set the psychological tone for his reaction to this country were the Kentucky Derby, the America's Cup, Miami Beach for the Convention and Watergate. That's a pretty heavy series of shocks, I think, for an artist in his late twenties who never wanted to work over here in the first place.

  ED.: Why not?

  HST: I dont' think he ever even liked the idea of this country, much less the reality.

  ED.: That shows. He seems to be horrified by America.

  HST: Yeah. That's one of the reasons he's fun to work with -- he has a really fine, raw sense of horror.

  ED.: What is it about America that horrifies him?

  HST: Everything. The only time I've ever seen him relaxed and peaceful in this country was when he and his wife came out to my place in Colorado for a while. . . But, of course, that's total isolation; Ralph is very sensitive about his privacy.

  ED.: How does he behave in public when you've been with him?

  HST: He's deceptively mild in public, although every once in a while he'll run amok. He behaved pretty well at the Derby, even though he was drunk the whole time.

  ED.: Drunk?

  HST: He's constantly drunk, in public --

  ED.: Does he draw on the spot?

  HST: Well he sketches on the spot, he takes a lot of photographs. He uses a little sort of Minox-type camera. I didn't see him taking that many photos in Miami and Washington. He used to do more of that in the old days. Now he sketches on the spot, but then he goes back to the hotel and has the whole assignment finished that same night.

  ED.: So he's very fast?

  HST: Yes, it's shocking to work with him. Just about the time I'm starting to sit down and get to work, he's finished. It's depressing. It took me three weeks to write that Kentucky Derby story, but Steadman did his drawings in three days. He's not really a serious boozer, you know, but when he comes over here and gets involved in these horrible scenes, it causes him to drink heavily.

  ED.: What happened at America's Cup?

  HST: Well we met in New York, flew to Newport, and on the way I. . . uh. . . I had a whole bunch of these little purple pills somebody had given me. I knew it was going to be a beastly goddamn assignment and I had definite plans for keeping it as unhinged as possible. . . kind of off-balance, off-center. I had no intention of getting a serious story out of it. Our idea was to drive this boat we'd chartered right into the race, right into the course. It was a 50-foot sloop -- not a racing boat, but a pretty big sailing yacht. Unfortunately, the weather was so horrible that the bastards only raced one day out of three and the scene was still going on when we had to leave. . . for a very specific reason.

  On the way up, I took one of these purple pills, which turned out to be psilocybin I think. They were just about right. I ended up taking two or three a day, for general research purposes. . . Steadman doesn't get at all into drugs usually -- He smokes a little now and then, but he's horrified of anything psychedelic. He had a kind of personal drug crisis up there in Newport. We spent the first two days just waiting for the weather to lift so the boats could go out. It was intolerably dull, and on the third day he said, "You seem to be having a wonderful time in this nightmare. I can't figure it out." And I said, "Well, I rely on my medicine to keep totally twisted. Otherwise, I couldn't stand this bullshit." And he said, "Well, maybe I'll try one." At this point, I was up to about four a day. . . So he tried one -- I think he got it down about six o'clock at night in one of those bars in town, a yachting crowd bar on the pier. And by midnight he was completely berserk. He stayed that way for about ninety-six hours, during which time we had to leave, had to charter a plane and flee because the police were looking for us.

  ED.: Why?

  HST: Well, at some point the morning after we took that first pill -- or it might have been the next morning, I'm not sure -- Ralph was in an insane condition for three or four straight days -- but at one point I decided that, in order to get things moving a bit, we'd sneak over to the Australian yacht, the challenger Gretel, and paint "Fuck the Pope" on the side in huge letters, as big as we could make them. So that when Gretel boomed out of the harbor in the morning, this brutal graffiti would be painted in such a way that people on board, the crew members, couldn't see it because "Fuck the Pope" would be below the deck on the water line. . . whereas everybody else woutd see it immediately from the press and spectator boats.

  But there was no way to get in there, to do the paint job. It was like trying to get into Fort Knox. The boats were guarded so well that the only way to get near them was to come in from the sea. Even that was sort of guarded, because it was all lit up, and no boat of any size or any reason to be out there at night could have made it in by sea.

  So we got a dinghy off the boat we were chartering. I hadn't rowed a boat at all for about ten years, and I don't think Ralph had ever rowed one. I ended up rowing. The boat was just about big enough for the two of us to fit in -- a very small dinghy. And we came in kind of around the pilings on the sea-side. We were sneaking from piling to piling. We'd bought these six cans of red spray paint from the hardware store in the town and -- no, I actually bought them in New York, come to think of it. So, I guess I knew what we were going to do. Ralph was going to be the artist and I was just rowing the boat.

  Somehow we managed to get right next to the Australian yacht. It looked like a huge, silver knife in the water; just a giant blade, a racing machine -- not good for anything else, absolutely stark and menacing. Particularly when you find yourself down at the water line right next to the hull -- with all the spotlights and guards around it, up above.

  We could hear people talking further back, at the entrance to the dock. It never occurred to them that anyone would come in from the sea. I was trying to hold the dinghy against the side without making any noise, while Ralph stood up and painted. And you know those spray-paint cans have a little ball in them, and in order to mix the paint up, you have to shake it -- the little ball bangs around inside, and it hisses just before the paint catches and it starts to work.

  It was the goddamn little ball that got us. Because it was so quiet in the harbor -- the sound of that ball bouncing around inside as Ralph shook the can up. . . And then when he started cursing as the hissing got going, this really alarmed whoever was up there, and they began to shout.

  Somebody looked over the side and yelled, "What are you guys doing down there?" And I said something like "Nothing, nothing at all," and told Ralph to keep going. And then they began to shout and a Land-Rover came speeding down the length of the dock, lights went on everywhere, all over the damn slip. It was a pretty tough stretch to row across with all these lights on us. But we realized we were going to have to do it -- or get jailed immediately -- so Ralph just hung on and we took off toward the darkness and the open sea in this dinghy with all these people yel
ling at us -- and Ralph still in a terrible psychological condition. . .

  Because this was real fear that came on top of everything else. When the spotlights hit us, I thought they might start shooting. They were almost insanely serious about the security.

  We got away by heading out to sea, then doubling back into the darkness of the piling across the harbor. But we knew we had only gotten away temporarily, because by this time they'd seen us. . . We were in a yellow dinghy belonging to a yellow boat, and by dawn there would be no question as to where we'd come from.

  We were fucked; there was no doubt about it. Steadman was raving incoherently as we rowed back to our boat; he hates violence of any kind. . . But I figured he'd hate jail even worse, so when we got to our boat I told him to pack his gear while I took a big flare-gun up on deck and fired three huge parachute flares up into the night-- these brutes that cost about ten dollars apiece; they go up about 100 yards, then explode into four falling fireballs. . . the kind of things you're never supposed to use except for serious emergencies at sea. Anyway, I fired three of these while Ralph was packing -- twelve orange fireballs that went off like twelve shotgun blasts and lit up the whole harbor. . . Some of them fell on boats and started fires, people were shouting, leaping out of their bunks and grabbing fire extinguishers. . . There was total chaos in the harbor.

  I went below and got my own stuff together, then we hailed a passing motor launch -- it was almost dawn by this time -- and whoever was running that launch agreed to give us a ride into the shore for twenty dollars.

  From there we got a cab straight to the airport and chartered a small plane to Boston. Ralph was still in a really fiendish condition. He was barefooted, out of his mind and his only refuge was New York. I called down there and found out that Scanlan's had folded yesterday, but a friend of Steadman's would meet him at the airport. I said, "Now look, you have to meet him, because he's in terrible condition. . . I have to be back in Colorado today in order to file to run for sheriff". . . that was the deadline. So this guy agreed to meet Ralph at La Guardia. He went into a raving frenzy, cursing me, cursing America. . .