Gonzo

by Corey Seymour

  Then I had to go down to New York because I needed a doctor. I was palpitating, and I had to take Librium to bring me down. They put me out for twenty-four hours. Awful. I flew back to England, and I insisted on standing up on the plane. Every time I closed my eyes I saw purple things moving, and wings. I believe I was harboring devils of a kind. Hunter said I was up for ninety-six hours.

  SANDY THOMPSON

  When “gonzo” first happened, Hunter’s first reaction to it was terrible guilt—just terrible. They didn’t get it. But he could also see that here was an avenue; people seemed to really like this, and they were going to pay him for it. He thought it was gibberish.

  It was past deadline, and the editors of Scanlan’s were trying to get the Kentucky Derby piece from him, and he said, “I can’t send it to you; it’s gibberish.” They said, “Send it anyway.” It wasn’t up to his standard, but finally he sent it. And what do you know—they called and they said it was great. Hunter knew it wasn’t; it was outbursts of greatness and wildness. But it wasn’t a final draft by a long, long shot. He did not feel good about that.

  DOUG BRINKLEY

  The Internet is full of bogus falsehoods propagated by uninformed English professors and pot-smoking fans about the etymological origins of “gonzo.” Here’s how it happened: The legendary New Orleans R&B piano player James Booker recorded an instrumental song called “Gonzo” in 1960. The term “gonzo” was Cajun slang that had floated around the French Quarter jazz scene for decades and meant, roughly, “to play unhinged.” The actual studio recording of “Gonzo” took place in Houston, and when Hunter first heard the song he went bonkers—especially for this wild flute part. From 1960 to 1969—until Herbie Mann recorded another flute triumph, “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—Booker’s “Gonzo” was Hunter’s favorite song.

  When Nixon ran for president in 1968, Hunter had an assignment to cover him for Pageant and found himself holed up in a New Hampshire motel with a columnist from the Boston Globe Magazine named Bill Cardoso. Hunter had brought a cassette of Booker’s music and played “Gonzo” over, and over, and over—it drove Cardoso crazy, and that night, Cardoso jokingly derided Hunter as “the ‘Gonzo’ man.” Later, when Hunter sent Cardoso his Kentucky Derby piece, he got a note back saying something like, “Hunter, that was pure Gonzo journalism!” Cardoso claimed that the term was also used in Boston bars to mean “the last man standing,” but Hunter told me that he never really believed Cardoso on this. Just another example of “Cardoso bullshit,” he said.

  PAT BUCHANAN was a Nixon adviser and speechwriter.

  I met Hunter in New Hampshire when he came to interview the old man. We used to go up to New Hampshire to campaign for two or three days, then take the former vice president down to Florida, where he could relax and get a tan and let our advertising do the talking for us. We won the primary on March 14 after a six-week campaign, and Hunter and I were holed up in some hotel in Nashua on a snowy night and discovered that we were in possession of, I forget, either a gallon or a half-gallon of Wild Turkey. Now, I had a lot of stamina in those days, and the two of us stayed up all night arguing fiercely about communism. It got pretty vicious and brutal by dawn.

  We got Hunter to interview Nixon in the car driving from Nashua to the airport where we were going to catch our Learjet. Hunter got out of the car right by the plane as they were gassing up and snapped his Zippo to light his cigarette. My friend Nicholas Ruwe, a great advance man, knocked it out of his hand. We thought we were going to be blown to kingdom come.

  Hunter and Nixon had talked about sports all the way out to the airport. Later, Hunter said it was laid out as a rule that sports was all he could talk about with the old man, but I don’t recall limiting him like that; that’s all they happened to talk about, I guess.

  WILLIAM KENNEDY

  In time he found a way to turn himself into this singular first-person itinerant journalist who was interesting no matter what he wrote about. He put himself into the picture and he became the story.

  JANN WENNER

  It felt natural. We had the same goals; he had the talent, and I knew how to handle it and had a place to put it. We had many all-night talks about our goals, our ideals, what we could do together. We liked each other enormously. We recognized in each other the belief that work and play should be as close as possible. And I was a great foil for him.

  I was starting to ski again, and I had friends in Aspen, so I’d go stay with them, or I’d stay at the Jerome, or I’d stay with Hunter. But soon it became clear that I wasn’t going to both visit Hunter and ski. His hours didn’t really allow that. So if I wanted to ski, I started staying elsewhere and then going out to Owl Farm at night to visit him, or meeting him in town . . . but that invariably meant five other people were involved.

  I was staying at a condo as the guest of this incredibly wealthy man—the original financier of Intel. I invited Hunter to have dinner with us at the fanciest restaurant in Aspen at that time, the Paragon, and Hunter arrived with the usual amount of commotion and ambled over and said to this man, “It’s wonderful to have the honor to meet you.” I had told Hunter beforehand to be cool, that this guy was worth a billion dollars, et cetera, et cetera.

  Hunter sat down and said, “I don’t want to bother anybody, so I brought my own food.” He put a package wrapped in butcher paper on the table and opened it. It was a huge piece of liver covered with maggots. The guy nearly puked on the table, then got up and left; you had to fall on the floor laughing.

  “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan” was Hunter’s next assignment after “Freak Power in the Rockies.” It was a serious piece of pretty standard reporting, not really the kind of thing that Hunter would become known for, but he wanted to do it because he had a very close friend, Oscar Acosta, who was right in the middle of the La Raza movement in L.A., and we all thought this could be a good heavy-duty piece. Hunter was fascinated with Oscar. And it was in the middle of writing and reporting this piece that Hunter took the assignment to go to Vegas for Sports Illustrated to do a quickie on the Mint 500 motorcycle race.

  DOUG BRINKLEY

  Hunter used to claim that the phrase “Fear and Loathing” was a derivation of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. In actuality he lifted it from Thomas Wolfe’s The Web and the Rock. He had read the novel when he lived in New York. He used to mark up pages of favorite books, underlining phrases that impressed him. On page sixty-two of The Web and the Rock he found “fear and loathing” and made it his. I asked him why he didn’t give Wolfe credit. Essentially he said it was too much of a hassle, that people would think he meant Tom Wolfe, his New Journalism contemporary. Not many of his friends knew this. His Aspen buddy Dan Dibble did. Maybe a couple of others.

  JOE EDWARDS

  After Hunter’s run for sheriff, he joined some law enforcement organizations and started getting all sorts of literature sent to him. One was this thing about a district attorneys’ convention about drug enforcement that was going to be held in Las Vegas. Hunter thought, “What a great, outrageous thing to do—to get stoned as hell and go to that convention,” and that’s what he did. He and Oscar, who is another whole story. Oscar was crazy. I think he ultimately got killed, or shot, or something. He used to carry a .357 around, and he had these wild eyes. I was very careful around him.

  JANN WENNER

  In the middle of doing “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” Hunter was staying at my house in San Francisco. That’s where he started to write “Vegas” on a red IBM Selectric that I had had set up on a rolltop desk in the basement. I remember him showing me the first ten pages, asking me if it was worth it to keep going. It was pretty brilliant stuff, way off on a tangent—just that amazing list of what was in the Cadillac’s trunk. I had no idea where he was going, but I said, “Yeah, we’ll go with that, but let’s finish this other thing first.” To his credit, he did finish the Aztlan piece.

  CHARLES PERRY was the first copy chief of Rolling Stone.

  He was going to fini
sh the Aztlan story in the office, so they made him a little area in the record library where he could work. I did not tolerate deadline-itis. Hunter was just a guy with a book about the Hells Angels, and I was trying to impose deadlines on everybody. One day I stuck my head into his office and said, “Hi, Hunter! I’m Charlie Perry. How are you doing?” and he said, “Oh, it’s going great, it’s going great! I really got the momentum. It’s like a train on greased wheels. If I can just keep this momentum up.” I didn’t know exactly what to make of that, but then two days later, I asked him how he was doing again, and he said, “I lost my momentum. I’ve been up for two days on speed. I haven’t changed my clothes. I think my feet are rotting.”

  DAVID FELTON was an associate editor at Rolling Stone in 1971.

  You had to give up a lot, as a traditional editor, if you were working with Hunter. I remember calling him once after our fact-checkers had gone over a piece of his, and telling him, “They called the hotel from your story—there is no room 303.” And he said, “Don’t worry about that. Let’s move on.”

  He had a lot going on that I didn’t know anything about. We’d work together all afternoon, and all of a sudden he’d make a phone call and two beautiful twins would show up. Where did they come from? I had no idea. He was always looking for a new thrill. One time at Rolling Stone he got hold of some kind of weird makeup that was a horrible, ghoulish white, and he put it all over his face. It looked like he had OD’d or something, and he walked all around with it. He thought it was hilarious. Another day he put a recording of screaming rabbits in the speaker system in the office.

  But the thing about working with Hunter was that it got worse. From the very start, he was doing battle with Jann over expenses. When he was in Las Vegas covering the DAs’ convention, I remember getting a phone call from him—I think it was a total setup—but he had Oscar screaming in the background, and it was all about how Hunter couldn’t control Oscar, and it was all because Jann had refused to pay their expense money, and Oscar had used all their money to buy a flute. It was just a big act, and it was very funny, but it was kind of terrifying. They were basically living out that story while he was on the story.

  Sometime around then I went out in San Francisco with Hunter and Oscar, and Hunter had me pull up to Jann’s house, where I think Hunter was staying. Jann wasn’t there. Hunter said, “This’ll just take me a minute.” He went into the house and came out with Jann’s stereo amplifier under his arm. He was kind of grinning as he got in the car, and he said, “Now we’re even.”

  JOE ESZTERHAS was a reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer in the fall of 1970.

  I went out one Sunday to report on a shooting in a bar on the east side of Cleveland. A Hells Angels type of motorcycle gang had shot up a bar and killed three or four people. Two or three weeks later I got a call from Paul Scanlon, the managing editor at Rolling Stone. I wrote five thousand words about it for Rolling Stone, and a couple weeks after it came out, I got a note from Hunter Thompson that said, “I don’t know you, but I read your piece and now there are two of us that know enough about motorcycle gangs to write about them. And the fact that there’s two of us really pisses me off, but nice going.” I can’t tell you what that meant to me, because Rolling Stone at that point was the hot publication. I had read Hell’s Angels, and I really admired Hunter’s work. The fact that he had sent me this note really, really moved me. I wound up doing a couple of other freelance pieces for Rolling Stone, and eventually they hired me full-time.

  I was a real heavy drinker and knew how to enjoy drugs, but I was nothing compared to this guy. We would have breakfast at eleven in the morning, and it would consist of five or six Bloody Marys and twelve or fourteen lines of coke. By the middle of the day I was nearly passed out sitting at my desk, but he could do that all day. But with all the drinking, all the drugs, I never saw Hunter not in control of himself. His constitution was really amazing, but that was also a macho thing between him and me. I think it had to do with violence. I learned how to fight at a young age—well, either fight or negotiate. Hunter, I think, got a big charge out of that. I prided myself, as did he, on being in control. No matter how much you drank, or how many drugs you did, the manly thing was not to give up your control, not to pass out on the ground, not to be out of your skull. To still maintain your cool and your sense of manhood, your sense of macho.

  TIM FERRIS joined Rolling Stone as chief of its New York bureau in 1971.

  I came out to San Francisco to meet everybody and get to work. My first day there, we were having a meeting—talking about the budget, actually—and Hunter appeared, looking much as we remember him now, in shorts, with that weird bowlegged gait of his. He had an open beer in one hand and part of a six-pack in the other, and a cigarette, and he was wearing a lady’s wig—and lipstick. Jann asked Hunter if he wanted to take me out on the town and show me the sights, and on that first time out, Hunter managed to misplace two rental cars in the same evening. We remained friendly ever after.

  PAUL SCANLON was managing editor of Rolling Stone for most of the 1970s.

  There was a round oak table in the editorial bullpen, and Hunter would make this big production out of opening up his satchel and unpacking it. We all kind of wandered over to see what was going to come out—fresh grapefruits, notepads, a can of mace, a tape recorder, a carton of Dunhills, spare cigarette holders, a bottle of Wild Turkey, a large police flashlight, lighter fluid, a bowie knife—the usual stuff.

  One day Hunter came in, and I’m standing there with Charlie Perry and another editor, Grover Lewis, and he pulls out a sheaf of manuscript, legal sized and all neatly stapled together, and he handed one section to me and one to Charlie and one to Grover, and then stomped out. It was the first chapter of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” I went into my office to read it, and I started howling when the bats started coming out of the sky, and by the time I finished reading it, I was pounding on my desk and I couldn’t stop laughing. I wandered into Grover’s office, and he was hunched over his desk wheezing. I thought “Shit, he’s having a seizure!” And he turned around, and there were tears in his eyes and he couldn’t stop laughing.

  We spent the next hour just reading lines back and forth to each other. Everybody was really flat knocked out. I know Jann was. Nobody expected it.

  CHARLES PERRY

  We passed around the manuscript to the editors, and it took us a day to read it and observe it. I remember someone saying that the day after you read it, life just seemed incredibly dramatic, like you never knew when a pack of pythons might come attack you from the corner.

  PAUL SCANLON

  Later that afternoon at Jerry’s, which was the staff watering hole across the street, the editors toasted Raoul Duke and our good fortune while we recited our favorite lines—“One toke? You poor fool! Wait till you see those goddamn bats!” We were like goofy schoolkids.

  CHARLES PERRY

  Even at Rolling Stone, which had been journalistic in its approach to things, the accepted way of talking about psychedelics was the Timothy Leary way, which was essentially as a spiritual experience. Hunter was writing about the fact that sometimes when you’re on acid, you’re just totally fucked up. It was a breath of fresh air.

  JANN WENNER

  Working with Hunter was already a major hand-holding job. It meant a minimum of two, maybe three people assigned to the task, including me. It was too much for any one person to handle, even that early on, because of the hours and the time Hunter took. He liked having a team of people working on his stuff. He liked the company, and he liked the crisis atmosphere. I could never change that pattern.

  But “Vegas” was completely different. He did that on his own. It took him several months to write it. He’d send me pages. I’d change a word here or suggest a little thing there, but it was already completely formed. I’d ask him to write transitions to make the narrative more complete, but he politely and firmly refused. It was his pure fantasy, coming directly out of his own mind. Th
ere was no real reporting involved, except when he wanted to go back and do the district attorneys’ conference, which was hysterical and had pure gonzo potential.

  Memo from Hunter to Jann Wenner, written as he was finishing Part II of “Vegas”

  Jann . . .

  The central problem here is that you’re working overtime to treat this thing as Straight or at least Responsible journalism . . . whereas in truth we are dealing with a classic of irresponsible gibberish. You’d be better off trying to make objective, chronological sense of “Highway 61,” The Ginger Man, “Mister Tambourine Man,” or even Naked Lunch.

  Despite these onerous comparisons, I suspect the point still stands. And the real nut of the problem is that I seem to resent any attempts to tell me how I should write my gonzo journalism. I realize that this stance is rude & irrational, but I guess I tend to operate that way now and then.

  This gibberish is no more “journalism” than Steadman’s art is “illustration.” Charlie [Charles Perry, RS associate editor] was lamenting the fact—and I agreed—that one of Ralph’s drawings would have been nicer if he’d included a herd of bats. But he didn’t—so I offered to draw them in myself, with an ink pencil. Charlie was horrified. Which was exactly the right reaction. I wouldn’t touch one of Ralph’s drawings—and for the same reason, I can’t work up much enthusiasm for treating “Fear & Loathing” like a news story. No doubt the holes and kinks should be filled, but for some reason I just can’t work up much zeal for the job. Maybe after 12 or 20 hours of sleep I might think differently, but I wouldn’t count on it. Let’s keep in mind that this was never a commissioned work of journalism; it was a strange neo-fictional outburst that was deemed so rotten and wasteful, journalistically, that neither RS nor Spts. Illustrated would even reimburse me for my expenses. So I’m not in much of a mood, right now, to act grateful for any editorial direction. (No doubt I’m wrong and bullheaded on this score, but the way this thing developed has made me feel sort of personal about it; irrationally possessive, as it were—and at this stage of the action I’m not real hungry for advice about how the thing should be handled. It’s been an instinct trip from the start, and I suspect it’s going to stay that way—for good or ill.