Gonzo

by Corey Seymour

  Anyway, I’ve worked myself into such a stupor of crazed fatigue that I can’t even sleep—and when I went into the office today Hank [Torgrimson, RS accountant] was ready to have me arrested for Stealing this typewriter. Things seem to be breaking down—after a long run of Good Work. So I think it’s time to go home. I’ll call you on Monday or Tuesday and see how things look then. But my general feeling is that you have a hell of a lot more important things to concern yourself with than perfecting the chronology of Vegas/Fear & Loathing. I have the feeling that it’s a pretty fair piece of writing, as it stands, and I’ve developed a certain affection for it. . . .

  I like the bastard. So why not get on to more important things? (I’m not seriously opposed to any cutting or editing, but don’t expect me to get wired on the idea of adding big sections that I didn’t feel like including in the first place.)

  OK for now. I’m in a massively rotten mood, trying to stay awake until plane time—seeing double, feeling bugs under my kneecaps, etc.

  Fuck this—maybe I’ll send another chunk(s) of Vegas II when I get back home—but let’s not worry or count on it. We have enough, and 90% of it is absolutely right—on its own terms.

  And that, after all, is the whole point.

  Ciao,

  H

  JANN WENNER

  We agreed from the get-go, after he’d written 5,000 or 10,000 words, that we would publish it in two parts for our fourth-anniversary issue. We knew it was quite special, and we put it on two consecutive covers.

  From “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream,” by Raoul Duke Rolling Stone 95; November 11, 1971

  I drove around to the Circus-Circus Casino and parked near the back door. “This is the place,” I said. “They’ll never fuck with us here.”

  “Where’s the ether?” said my attorney. “This mescaline isn’t working.”

  I gave him the key to the trunk while I lit up the hash pipe. He came back with the ether-bottle, un-capped it, then poured some into a Kleenex and mashed it under his nose, breathing heavily. I soaked another Kleenex and fouled my own nose. The smell was overwhelming, even with the top down. Soon we were staggering up the stairs towards the entrance, laughing stupidly and dragging each other along, like drunks.

  This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel . . . total loss of all basic motor skills: blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue—severence of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally . . . you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can’t control it.

  You approach the turnstiles leading into the Circus-Circus and you know that when you get there, you have to give the man two dollars or he won’t let you inside . . . but when you get there, everything goes wrong: you misjudge the distance to the turnstile and slam against it, bounce off and grab hold of an old woman to keep from falling, some angry Rotarian shoves you and you think: What’s happening here? What’s going on? Then you hear yourself mumbling: “Dogs fucked the Pope, no fault of mine. Watch out! . . . Why money? My name is Brinks; I was born . . . born? Get sheep over side . . . women and children to armored car . . . orders from Captain Zeep.”

  Ah, devil ether—a total body drug. The mind recoils in horror, unable to communicate with the spinal column. The hands flap crazily, unable to get money out of the pocket . . . garbled laughter and hissing from the mouth . . . always smiling.

  Ether is the perfect drug for Las Vegas. In this town they love a drunk. Fresh meat. So they put us through the turnstiles and turned us loose inside.

  JANN WENNER

  Hunter would infuse everything with drama; whatever he was doing was always full of energy and craziness—things were always at stake, and there would be crises. Going to the district attorneys’ conference was going to be this dangerous undercover mission. He was going to go right to the edge of this or that.

  Then we were haggling over expenses. The magazine was on a shoestring at the time, and I had to say, “No, you can’t rent a Cadillac.” Rolling Stone was small; we were still in our third year. If people were making $125 a week, that was a lot. The idea that he wanted to rent a Cadillac was out of the question. What was his famous line? “You can’t cover the American dream in a fucking Volkswagen.”

  His first book of letters is consumed with correspondence about money and expenses. It’s embarrassing. That, and then how he was going to slice either “Vegas” or something else up into several books. He was really trying to maximize the money coming in. I guess as a young and struggling writer with a wife and kid, he had to do it. But it was also a little over the top. Hunter loved to live well, so he was constantly spending money. He was always in debt to four or five or six people. He was always in debt to me.

  GEORGE STRANAHAN

  He always had this kind of Robin Hood thing, that it’s okay to take things—if somebody’s got plenty, it’s okay, you don’t have to pay them. In fact, they owe you. He always felt entitled to more than he got—that there was a certain societal abuse of his talent, that society was not giving him enough. Lord knows he knew very well how to spend it! He was financially imprudent. I was his landlord, so I talked to him about it. At a certain point in the early seventies, I said, basically, “You guys are irregular with the rent payments, and I understand a writer’s life might be irregular, so let’s just recut the deal to make it into a lease-purchase instead of just a rent.” That made him much happier, because he wasn’t just writing a check. He was struggling, and I was not, and it really irked him that he was taking his meagerness and sending it to me.

  He attracted “financial advisers” like leeches, and eventually he’d get around to wondering, “Where’s the money?” Well, these other people got it; they sold him a bill of goods because he didn’t really have a good feeling for how you handle money. It wasn’t his strength. He spent plenty. He spent everything he got, ever.

  JANN WENNER

  He knew he had his hands on a great piece of writing. After we published “Vegas,” he became dominant in our world. In that four-year period from the start of “Vegas” to the campaign trail and Watergate in 1974, working with Hunter probably consumed a quarter of my life. I had other people working with him on the road or in the office, but I had to basically keep the same schedule he did until the story was done. He would never let me turn a piece over to another editor; in the end, I had to do every word of it. And, of course, I loved it.

  TIM CAHILL was an associate editor at Rolling Stone in 1971.

  I didn’t have to work directly with Hunter. I’d spend one night out with him and then spend two days recuperating—but when I’d run into him two days later, he’d still be going from the last time I saw him. He looked like he could take care of himself—there was some physical power there. This confused me as time went on, because had I abused myself the way Hunter continually did, I suspect that I would have deteriorated physically quite rapidly.

  He was always yelling at himself, like “AAHHHH!!! CAZART!!!” and then there would be these long silences, which meant that he was probably writing. He would sometimes leave notes in the office when he wasn’t there that said, “Don’t even try to look for me.” He’d run to a nearby indoor pool and swim, which no one would ever know about.

  JANN WENNER

  Everyone loved to be around him—even Charlie Perry, who would grumble about Hunter’s complete disregard of a practical and helpful deadline schedule. He’d come to San Francisco relatively often and stay at my house. Of course, those were the early days. We all had stamina on our side. By the time of the campaign trail in ’72, the idea of Hunter staying at my house really wore itself out. So we moved him out to the Seal Rock Inn overlooking the Pacific Ocean at the absolute western edge of the city. It was also good to get Hunter away from people just so he could have the space to work. People wanted to hang out wi
th him, both legitimate—all his fellow workers and bon vivants—and illegitimate people—the crazies, whom he was quite tolerant of.

  CHARLES PERRY

  After “Fear and Loathing,” people in Colorado were giving him stuff they’d written, thinking he could get them in Rolling Stone. I was the poetry editor, and he sent me a package of poems from other people once with a note that said, “I don’t know about this stuff. If you feel the same way, send it back to them with this.” He included a prepackaged rejection letter that read:

  You worthless, acid-sucking piece of illiterate shit! Don’t ever send this kind of brain-damaged swill in here again. If I had the time, I’d come out there and drive a fucking wooden stake into your forehead. Why don’t you get a job, germ? Maybe delivering advertising handouts door to door, or taking tickets for a wax museum. You drab South Bend cocksuckers are all the same; like those dope-addled dingbats at the Rolling Stone office. I’d like to kill those bastards for sending me your piece . . . and I’d just as soon kill you, too. Jam this morbid drivel up your ass where your readership will better appreciate it.

  Sincerely,

  Yail Bloor III, Minister of Belles-Lettre.

  P.S. Keep up the good work. Have a nice day.

  We actually sent it out to a couple of people, thinking they would appreciate it. One person took it to a lawyer and asked whether he could sue us, and the lawyer said, “No, you don’t have a leg to stand on . . . but could I Xerox it?”

  TIM CAHILL

  Hunter imitators were all over the place. All these writers were writing this gibberish, but they lost sight of one of Hunter’s saving graces, which was that he was hilarious. He couldn’t have been effective without his humor. But there were dozens and dozens of Hunter imitators who all thought that they should be published.

  RALPH STEADMAN

  A lot of people around Hunter have tried to be like him, but I found the best way to get on with him was always to be myself. I was gentler, but my drawings were wilder. As he said to me, “You’re a liar, Ralph. You’re worse than me, and weirder.”

  Actually, what I thought was pathetic later on was not so much watching people try to be like Hunter as try to write like Hunter. It doesn’t work. He was writing something that came out of the way he talked. And it’s an extraordinary thing, because he was such a bad speaker, but if you could catch it, it was a bloody good sentence.

  JANN WENNER

  You just couldn’t help, when you were around Hunter, picking up some of his mannerisms and his expressions. No one was immune to it. To this day, if I hear a loud noise, I overreact in a sudden, startled way, jumping out of my seat, shouting, “What the fuck?!” like he did. I can’t shake it.

  WILLIAM KENNEDY

  When he started working for Rolling Stone he could write anything he pleased. Look what he did with that assignment to cover a Las Vegas sheriffs’ convention. That’s hardly journalism. Yes, it’s grounded in historical fact, he was there, there was the convention, he did have an assignment, and so on; and he claimed it was all true and that he could prove it with his notes, but that only makes his notes a transcript of his performance and his wild and fanciful imagination, the first phase of the novel. What he then wrote was a singular work that was a mutation of the fictional form, which is why his place is secure, because nobody can ever do that again. You can’t duplicate him; it’s just so obvious when anyone tries. There’s no way you can follow that mind or that career.

  JANN WENNER

  Rolling Stone at that time was a collection of journalistic misfits, all of them extremely talented. They all recognized the talent and eccentricity in one another and shared a common purpose. The leader of the pack in the office came to be Joe Eszterhas, but the star was always Hunter. It created a bit of a rivalry. Joe was jealous, but Hunter never seemed to feel that at all. He never did anything but treat Joe in the most magnanimous and generous fashion, as he treated everybody. Likewise, Joe was deeply respectful of Hunter’s talent and charm.

  Tom Wolfe had a great deal of respect for Hunter and wrote wonderful things about him in his New Journalism anthology. I introduced them to each other for the first time when they were both writing for Rolling Stone. In fact, the first installment of the Rolling Stone version of “The Right Stuff” opens with a lede passage that’s an homage to Hunter’s style.

  TOM WOLFE

  Hunter had been very kind to me when I was writing The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I had gathered from Hell’s Angels that he had been present when Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters gave a party for the Hells Angels, which had happened before I had even known about Kesey and the Pranksters. I called Hunter up from out of the blue, and he sent me some tapes he had recorded at that crazy party, which was really generous of him.

  JANN WENNER

  Hunter appreciated New Journalism and read its practitioners. He felt part of that fraternity of Wolfe, Talese, and Halberstam, whom he was very fond of, and Eszterhas as well. He knew he was different from them, but he also knew that he was one of the writers of that era who formed the fraternity. Of them all, he was the most unique: He was the wild man, and he was the genius.

  WILLIAM KENNEDY

  He liked the idea of being part of the New Journalism—and Tom Wolfe did include him in his book that codified that genre—but Hunter wanted more; he wanted to transcend it, and he did. He wanted to be singular, and he was.

  PAUL SCANLON

  One night, Jann summoned me and two other staffers over to his house. Hunter was there wearing this reddish-purplish tie-dyed shirt with what looked like a bull’s-eye over his stomach, and he proceeded to pull that ruse of shooting 151-proof rum into his navel with this huge horse syringe. It was really, really big. He didn’t actually do it, but he had us believing that he was doing it. He’d make this elaborate presentation of filling the syringe, and you saw the rum bottle and everything, and then he’d turn around and crash over and make these noises—“Ugghhh!!! Aggghhh!!!”

  JANN WENNER

  He’d come in the office, and there’d be a batch of mail from his fans. Every tenth letter had a joint in it or some pills or something. Hunter would open them up and usually take the stuff.

  It was during that period he first brought the plunger in—what appeared to be a horse-sized hypodermic needle. Hunter would take this monstrous gadget, plunge it into a grapefruit, extract the juice, and then shove the needle in his stomach in front of everybody. Of course, it was a needle that retracted and went back up into the plunger, but it looked very real. Hunter loved to see people recoil in fear and revulsion.

  PAUL SCANLON

  I went out drinking with Oscar a couple of times, which could be a bit frightening. Oscar was scary. He was a real sweetheart, but he was big—big and scary. Very intense, way more so than Hunter. Hunter could be very gentlemanly and almost shy sometimes, and Oscar was anything but.

  There was a falling-out at some point. Oscar felt like he was being ripped off by Hunter—that he had been somehow used, by Hunter and by Jann. On one of his last visits to Rolling Stone—I believe he was banished—he carved his middle name, Zeta, on a wooden shelf in the men’s room.

  JANN WENNER

  Oscar had a capacity to go crazy. He had no restraint. He was really bright and had a lot to say, but he was so full of anger and frustration because he felt his sheer size—he was imposing—and being Chicano distracted people from what he was trying to get across. He wasn’t a bad writer, but I think he was also jealous of Hunter’s talent. But he had this wonderful sense of humor and a great talent for having fun. I never felt threatened when I was with him. Oscar and I used to take acid and go out to topless bars. This was kind of second nature with the Brown Buffalo; I mean, why not?

  Oscar usually had a knife or a gun, but my impression was that he wouldn’t use them. In reality, he was more temperate than that, but he could fly off the handle. We all think he died in Mexico in some kind of drug deal gone bad. He had possibly done some ridiculous thing
that offended people, and he didn’t have Hunter’s gift of pulling back and charming everybody. He’d go too far.

  From “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat” Rolling Stone 254; December 15, 1977

  When the great scorer comes to write against Oscar’s name, one of the first few lines in the Ledger will note that he usually lacked the courage of his consistently monstrous convictions. There was more mercy, madness, dignity and generosity in that overweight, overworked and always overindulged brown cannonball of a body than most of us will meet in any human package even three times Oscar’s size for the rest of our lives—which are all running noticeably leaner on the high side, since that rotten fat spic disappeared.

  He was a drug-addled brute and a genuinely fiendish adversary in court or on the street—but it was none of these things that finally pressured him into death or a disappearance so finely plotted that it amounts to the same thing.

  What finally cracked the Brown Buffalo was the bridge he refused to build between the self-serving elegance of his instincts and the self-destructive carnival of his reality. He was a Baptist missionary at a leper colony in Panama before he was a lawyer in Oakland and East L.A., or a radical-chic author in San Francisco and Beverly Hills. . . . But whenever things got tense or when he had to work close to the bone, he was always a missionary. And that was the governing instinct that ruined him for anything else. He was a preacher in the courtroom, a preacher at the typewriter and a flat-out awesome preacher when he cranked his head full of acid.