I could see we were probably going to catch them. I saw the avenue up ahead, and knew what they were going to do. They were desperately trying to flag a passing Lotocao bus—like an open-air school bus that runs twenty-four hours a day. They were running desperately, spastic with fear and screaming for help, and I didn’t want them to escape.
So here we come, charging out of the darkness, our Converse sneakers slapping the concrete, and they’re running, these two native boys, screaming desperately for the bus to stop. It would be like two people running running down Forty-second Street through the crowd, trying to call for a taxi as if it were the last act of their lives. And instead of letting them go then, I caught up with what turned out to be the War Minister’s son just as he reached the bus. It was a drama before it happened. All this screaming: “Please stop! Oh God! Help!” The one I was after was almost within a step of getting his foot on the lowest rung of the bus.
. . .
I had no choice—I was going faster than he was, and as he slowed down to get on the bus I hit him, running from behind, and blasted him against the bus with my hands out. I wasn’t sure what to do. He really bounced off. Imagine that: thinking, Oh, Thank God—hands reaching down from the bus to help him escape. It was bad. We were brutish foreigners chasing two local boys for no apparent reason and attacking them.
The poor bastard was smashed—CLANG—against the side of the Lotocao, and I fell on top of him. Everything stopped when this terrible crash came—people ran out of stores and begged for police intervention. Maybe I got ahold of him and seized him; somehow he ended up sitting on the street, leaning against the back wheel of the bus, which didn’t have any hubcaps. There must have been some deep confusion there. I remember his head bouncing off of the lug nuts on the axle; I remember telling myself, Watch out, you fool—keep your knuckles away from those goddamn lug nuts.
Meanwhile, Geerlings was brutalizing the other guy—it was a shameful outburst. Geerlings had the guy’s feet bent back toward his neck, like a pretzel, trying to twist him the wrong way. A huge crowd had gathered. We were beating on both of them and screaming in English. The bus driver had stopped in the middle of the cross street; this was a bad fight, whatever it meant. And I was wearing shorts. So was Geerlings—a horrible Dutchman wanted for murder, an international criminal. I immediately pulled back.
After they got on the bus, we stopped for a cafezinho at the corner bar and waited for the mob to gather. I remember the two kids and the other people on the bus as it took off and rounded in first gear, the old cranky engines, these victims screaming through the windows and shaking their fists: “You dirty bastards! We kill you! You Fuck!”—in Brazilian . . . and we just laughed it off.
I don’t know why we went and stood at the counter there in the coffee place—a boutequim, it had an open front facing the street, two cents for a cup of coffee—to try and explain it. “Well, those guys were bad! They beat the dog.” It was hard to explain. Then, all of a sudden, the street began to fill up, people shouting, and I thought, What the hell. Is there a riot someplace? Something else is happening. There were maybe ten people in the boutequim, but we were facing the street. And this mob of people—it sounded like they were at a political protest. I said to Geerlings, “What the fuck is this?” There were people yelling and pointing at us, and then there were cops in the mob. I realized, Oh Fuck. It’s Us. Those monsters had gotten off at the next stop and grabbed the nearest cop.
. . .
I had seen a jaguar outside a bar on Avenida Copacabana the night before. There are bars in Rio that look like delis, the kind in New York with a long counter and seats, except there’s beer and food. While Geerlings was fucking with Germans, I went back to the bathroom. We’re talking about a wooden shack—Avenida Copacabana is backed up to favelas, the hills. These gigantic mountains come straight down, four or five hundred feet; it’s a jungle behind every building. Here I was, taking this routine piss in a ramshackle South American men’s room, which had a window—the garbage area was outside this window in the middle of bushes and trees. I wasn’t thinking about much of anything except what Geerlings might be doing to the Germans. I didn’t try to do anything to prevent him from beating these people. I just wanted him to be careful. I didn’t want to get busted for it.
I was looking out the window: blank darkness, garbage cans, and right in front of me, no more than three feet away, was a gigantic yellow- and black-spotted jaguar tigre, five, possibly six feet long, maybe five without the tail. A big cat.
I thought, What the fuck is this? I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. Ye gods! I had to go to Marigoso to confront cats at arm’s length. I was stunned. I just watched it. It fucked around. It didn’t make much noise. I don’t know what would have happened if one of the boys had come out and thrown some more garbage into the can. This thing was huge. I didn’t know what the hell to do, but I went back through the bar and the first thing I saw was Geerlings: He had hooked a Nazi in the nuts, and had him up against a phone booth with his cheek half pulled off. He wasn’t kidding; we had to get out of there.
I said, “Goddamn. You won’t believe this. While you were sitting out here fucking with Germans, I went back to the bathroom and there was a jaguar tiger, right in front of me. Right outside the window.”
“Oh no. Come on,” said Geerlings.
. . .
So the following night I took the little auto that I’d brought with me to Rio, a cheap .25 automatic. I carried it all over South America, usually loaded. Why carry one that’s not? I tied it around my neck with a string—it was too hot to carry it anywhere else.
“All right, Geerlings,” I said. “I’ll show you. We’re going to go back down here and get ourselves a tigre.”
I loaded up and we went back down to the bar and sat in the same place. Geerlings fucked with more Germans. The tigre never came back. How many times can you go to the men’s room? None of it makes a lot of sense. We gave up on the tiger. Then we started wandering around to the various nightclubs—after the one disappointment, we were ripe for a dog incident. It was action. We had no action and it built up. That’s really what it was—it was the explosion. If the cat had come, those guys wouldn’t have been hit.
It seemed incidental really to both of us. But, holy shit—the mob and the police and being arrested to chanting and shouting was bad enough, but to have a loaded .25 automatic.
I guess my beating the guy against the lug nuts got their attention—he was the son of the War Minister, so I understood that we were in trouble. But they left Geerlings alone; I saw him in the front of the crowd asking questions of the police: “I’m here to help.”
“Who are you?” the police asked Geerlings.
He was saying, “Well, it’s a friend. A countryman. What’s the trouble here? Don’t ask me. I’m nobody.”
Geerlings was trying to help in some way, but it was a mob scene, and I was trying to get the attention of the Embassy press officer. I was under arrest, and I was being led through a tunnel of chanting Cariokas: “String him up! Fuck him! U.S. out! Fuck U.S.A.! Abajo!”
There was going to be trouble when the gun was found—luckily, I had put it in my pocket. I saw Geerlings as I was being led down this corridor of people. It wasn’t like he was on the fringes of the crowd: He was like Ruby in the Oswald thing. He was on the front line, but he was acting like he was just an interested bystander—very smart, and he was getting away with it. I was being interviewed, but I could see him there; he was still talking to another cop, asking questions and being very officious. The first chance I got, I stepped out of the line as I was being led somewhere else. I had my hand on the .25—in the middle of three hundred people.
As I approached him—this is really quick thinking—I pulled the gun out. When they weren’t looking at me, I put the gun in his hand and said, “Run!”
There was a frozen moment, and he took off through the crowd like a bull. No more gun.
(Daniel E. Dibble)
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Yesterday’s Weirdness Is Tomorrow’s Reason Why
WILLIAM MCKEEN: Your use of drugs is one of the more controversial things about you and your writing. Do you think the use of drugs has been exaggerated by the media? How have drugs affected your perception of the world and/or your writing? Does the media portrayal of you as a “crazy” amuse, inflame, or bore you?
HUNTER S. THOMPSON: Obviously, my drug use is exaggerated or I would be long since dead. I’ve already outlived the most brutal abuser of our time—Neal Cassady. Me and William Burroughs are the only other ones left. We’re the last unrepentant public dope fiends, and he’s seventy years old and claiming to be clean. But he hasn’t turned on drugs, like that lying, treacherous, sold-out punk Timothy Leary.
Drugs usually enhance or strengthen my perceptions and reactions, for good or ill. They’ve given me the resilience to withstand repeated shocks to my innocence gland. The brutal reality of politics alone would probably be intolerable without drugs. They’ve given me the strength to deal with those shocking realities guaranteed to shatter anyone’s beliefs in the higher idealistic shibboleths of our time and the “American Century.” Anyone who covers his beat for twenty years—and my beat is “The Death of the American Dream”—needs every goddamned crutch he can find.
Besides, I enjoy drugs. The only trouble they’ve given me is the people who try to keep me from using them. Res Ipsa Loquitur. I was, after all, a Literary Lion last year.
The media perception of me has always been pretty broad. As broad as the media itself. As a journalist, I somehow managed to break most of the rules and still succeed. It’s a hard thing for most of today’s journeyman journalists to understand, but only because they can’t do it. The smart ones understood immediately. The best people in journalism I’ve never had any quarrel with. I am a journalist and I’ve never met, as a group, any tribe I’d rather be a part of or that are more fun to be with—despite the various punks and sycophants of the press.
It hasn’t helped a lot to be a savage comic-book character for the last fifteen years—a drunken screwball who should’ve been castrated a long time ago. The smart people in the media knew it was a weird exaggeration. The dumb ones took it seriously and warned their children to stay away from me at all costs. The really smart ones understood it was only a censored, kind of toned-down, children’s-book version of the real thing.
Now we are being herded into the nineties, which looks like it is going to be a true generation of swine, a decade run by cops with no humor, with dead heroes, and diminished expectations, a decade that will go down in history as The Gray Area. At the end of the decade, no one will be sure of anything except that you must obey the rules, sex will kill you, politicians lie, rain is poison, and the world is run by whores. These are terrible things to have to know in your life, even if you’re rich.
Since it’s become the mode, that sort of thinking has taken over the media, as it has business and politics: “I’m going to turn you in, son—not just for your own good but because you were the bastard who turned me in last year.”
This vilification by Nazi elements within the media has not only given me a fierce joy to continue my work—more and more alone out here, as darkness falls on the barricades—but has also made me profoundly orgasmic, mysteriously rich, and constantly at war with those vengeful retro-fascist elements of the Establishment that have hounded me all my life. It has also made me wise, shrewd, and crazy on a level that can only be known by those who have been there.
WM: Some libraries classify Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a travelogue, some classify it as nonfiction, and some classify it as a novel. How much of this book is true? How would you characterize this book (beyond the jacket copy info in The Great Shark Hunt)? You refer to it as a failed experiment in Gonzo journalism, yet many critics consider it a masterwork. How would you rate it?
HST: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a masterwork. However, true Gonzo journalism as I conceive it shouldn’t be rewritten.
I would classify it, in Truman Capote’s words, as a nonfiction novel in that almost all of it was true or did happen. I warped a few things, but it was a pretty accurate picture. It was an incredible feat of balance more than literature. That’s why I called it Fear and Loathing. It was a pretty pure experience that turned into a very pure piece of writing. It’s as good as The Great Gatsby and better than The Sun Also Rises.
WM: For years your readers have heard about The Rum Diary. Are you working on it, or on any other novel? Do you have an ambition to write fiction? Your stint as a newspaper columnist was successful, but do you have further ambitions within journalism?
HST: I’ve always had and still do have an ambition to write fiction. I’ve never had any real ambition within journalism, but events and fate and my own sense of fun keep taking me back for money, political reasons, and because I am a warrior. I haven’t found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, as much as going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on The Proud Highway.
March 1990
Letter to John Walsh
To: John Walsh / ESPN
June 21, 2002
JOHN.
Things are savage here, but I think of you constantly & thanx for yr. elegant assessment of Jann & the hideous world as we know it.
But I fear no evil, for the Lord is with me. Yea though I walk in the shadow of death, I fear no Evil, for the Lord is with me. . . .
You bet. He is our ace in the hole . . . Or maybe not. Maybe John Ashcroft is greater than God. Who knows? Ashcroft is the new point man for Bush Inc., yet he is dumb as a rock. He is like some Atavistic endeavor on speed—just another stupid monster as Attorney General of the U.S.A., a vengeful jackass with an IQ of 66.
How long, O Lord, how long? These Pigs just keep coming, like meat oozing over a counter . . . And they keep getting Meaner and Dumber.
Yeah. Trust me on this, Bubba. I knew Ed Meese in his prime, and I repeatedly cursed him as the murderous pig that he was—a low form of life that hung on the neck of this nation like a crust of poison algae. He was scum. Ed Meese was a Monster.
But he was nothing compared to John Mitchell, the anal-compulsive drunkard who was Nixon’s Attorney General in the terrible time of Watergate. He was the weirdest act in town.
John Mitchell was a big-time corporate lawyer and his wife was a serious drinker from Arkansas who squealed on him by accident and brought down the whole structure of the U.S. federal government. . . . It was wonderful. Those animals were forced into the tunnel, one by one, and destroyed like offal.
That is the nature of professional politics. Many are called, but few survive the nut-cutting hour—which appears to be coming down on our goofy Child President these days. . . . Ah, but it was ever thus, eh? Vicious thieves have always ruled the world. It is our wa. We are like pigs in the wilderness.
HUNTER
PART THREE
Gambling on a football game with Ed Bradley (HST archives)
The Foreign Correspondent
My opposition to war is not based upon pacifist or non-resistant principles. It may be that the present state of civilization is such that certain international questions cannot be discussed; it may be that they have to be fought out. We ought not to forget that wars are a purely manufactured evil and are made according to a definite technique. A campaign for war is made upon as definite lines as a campaign for any other purpose. First, the people are worked upon. By clever tales the people’s suspicions are aroused toward the nation against whom war is desired. Make the nation suspicious; make the other nation suspicious. All you need for this is a few agents with some cleverness and no conscious and a press whose interest is locked up with the interests that will be benefited by war. Then the “overt act” will soon appear. It is no trick at all to get an “overt act” once you work the hatred of two nations up to the proper pitch.
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�Henry Ford
May You Live in Interesting Times
There is an ancient Chinese curse that says, “May you live in interesting times,” which was told to me by an elderly dope fiend on a rainy night in Hong Kong near the end of the War in Vietnam. He was a giddy old man, on the surface, but I knew—and he knew that I knew—of the fear and respect he commanded all over Southeast Asia as a legendary Wizard in the far-flung Kingdom of Opium. I had stopped by his shop in Kowloon to get some advice and a chunk of black medicine for my friends who were trapped in the NVA noose that was inexorably closing in on Saigon. They refused to leave, they said, but in order to stay alive in the doomed and dysfunctional city, they needed only two things—cash money and fine opium.
I was no stranger to either one of these things, at the time—and I was, after all, in Hong Kong. All I had to do to get a satchel of green money and pure opium delivered to the Newsweek bureau was make a few phone calls. My friends trapped in Saigon were Journalists. We have a strong sense, people of my own breed and tribe, and we are linked—especially in war zones—by strong bonds of tribal loyalty. . . .
Last Days of Saigon
So bye bye, Miss American Pie,
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry,
Them good ole boys were drinkin whiskey and rye,
Singin’ this’ll be the day that I die,
This’ll be the day that I die . . .
I had never paid much attention to that song until I heard it on the Muzak one Saturday afternoon in the rooftop restaurant of the new Palace Hotel, looking down on the orange-tile rooftops of the overcrowded volcano that used to be known as Saigon and discussing military strategy over gin and lime with London Sunday Times correspondent Murray Sayle. We had just come back in a Harley Davidson—powered rickshaw from the Viet Cong’s weekly press conference in their barbed-wire enclosed compound at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport, and Sayle had a big geophysical map of Indochina spread out on the table between us, using a red felt-tipped pen as a pointer to show me how and why the South Vietnamese government of then-President Nguyen Van Thieu had managed to lose half the country and a billion dollars’ worth of U.S. weaponry in less than three weeks.
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