Gonzo

by Corey Seymour

  This is not always easy. My screeds tend to wander, without benefit of such traditional journalistic landmarks as “prior references” and “pyramid reverse-build foundations.”

  — 000—

  I still insist “objective journalism” is a contradiction in terms. But I want to draw a very hard line between the inevitable reality of “subjective journalism” and the idea that any honestly subjective journalist might feel free to estimate a crowd at a rally for some candidate the journalist happens to like personally at 2000 instead of 612 . . . or to imply that a candidate the journalist views with gross contempt, personally, is a less effective campaigner than he actually is.

  Hubert Humphrey, for instance: I don’t mind admitting that I think sheep-dip is the only cure for everything Humphrey stands for. I consider him not only a living, babbling insult to the presumed intelligence of the electorate, but also a personally painful mockery of the idea that Americans can learn from history.

  But if Hubert meets a crowd in Tampa and 77 ranking business leaders offer him $1000 each for his campaign, I will write that scene exactly as it happened—regardless of the immense depression it would plunge me into.

  No doubt I would look around for any valid word or odd touches that might match the scene to my bias. If any of those 77 contributors were wearing spats or monocles I would take care to mention it. I would probably follow some of them outside to see if they had “America—Love it or Leave it” bumper stickers on their cars. If one of them grabbed a hummingbird out of the air and bit its head off, I think it’s safe to say I would probably use that. . . .

  . . . but even if I did all that ugly stuff, and if the compilation of my selected evidence might pursuade a reader here and there to think that Humphrey was drawing his Florida support from a cabal of senile fascists . . . well . . . I probably wouldn’t get much argument from any of the “objective” journalists on the tour, because even the ones who would flatly disagree with my interpretation of what happened would be extremely reluctant to argue that theirs or anyone else’s was the flat objective truth.

  On the other hand, it’s also true that I will blow a fact here and there. A month ago I wrote that a registered independent in Colorado could vote in either the GOP or Democratic primary—which was true last year, but the law was recently changed. Somebody wrote to curse me for that one, and all I can do is apologize. In 1970 I knew every clause, twist, sub-section & constitutional precedent that had anything to do with voter-eligibility laws in Colorado. (When you run for office on the Freak Power ticket, the first thing you do is learn all the laws.) But when I moved to Washington and got into the Presidential Campaign I stopped keeping track of things like that.

  The only other serious error that I feel any need to explain or deal with at this time has to do with a statement about Nixon. What I wrote was: “There is still no doubt in my mind that he could never pass for human. . . .”

  But somebody cut the word “never.” El Ropo denies it, but our relationship has never been the same. He says the printer did it. Which is understandable, I guess; it’s a fairly heavy statement either way.

  Is Nixon “human?” Probably so, in the technical sense. He is not a fish or a fowl. There is no real argument about that. Most juries would accept, prima facie, the idea that the President of the United States is a mammal.

  He is surely not an Insect; and not of the lizard family. But “human” is something else. A mammal is not necessarily human. Rodents are mammals. An extremely intelligent Bayou Rat called “Honeyrunner” was once elected to the city council in DeFuniak Springs, Florida. Nobody called him “human,” but they say he did okay on the job.

  It would take a really sick and traitorous mind to compare the President of the United States to a Bayou Rat, regardless of intelligence. So maybe El Ropo was right. By almost any standard of responsible journalism the President must be referred to as “human.” It is one of those ugly realities—like the Amnesty Question—that we will all have to face & accept.

  — 000—

  The only other thing I had in mind was to say—to all the people who keep writing me those vicious goddamn letters—is that I get a really fine high boot out of reading them. I read them all, screening the best ones for good lines to steal. About a week ago I got one from somebody in Chicago, calling me a “Crypto-faggot Bulldog-nazi Honky-fascist Pig.”

  I can really get behind a letter like that. But most of the stuff is lame. I’m not running a goddamn “Dear Abby” service here. Anybody with problems should write to David Felton, Bleeding Heart Editor, at the San Francisco office. He’s paid to get down in the ditch with lunatics. And he likes it.

  But I have more important things to do.

  Politics.

  Human Problems are secondary.

  —30—

  JANN WENNER

  People used to ask me how much of Hunter’s stuff was true. Really, 90 percent of those things that he said or things he did were true. And if you believed the other 10 percent, God bless you. I’m not about to change your mind about it.

  PAT CADDELL

  In November—the issue where Rolling Stone used Tom Benton’s poster of “re-elect the president” with swastikas in the eye sockets of the skull—what Hunter wrote below that skull was some of the most brilliant stuff ever written about politics. At the top he started, “On Tuesday, November 7th, I will get out of bed long enough to go down to the polling place and vote for George McGovern. Afterwards, I will drive back to the house, lock the front door, get back in bed, and watch television as long as necessary.” It goes directly to the sadness of it.

  From “Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls . . .”

  Rolling Stone 121; November 9, 1972

  Nixon represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie doll president, with his Barbie doll wife and his box-full of Barbie doll children is also America’s answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts, on nights when the moon comes too close. . . .

  At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and a head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the lawn . . . pauses briefly to strangle the Chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness . . . towards the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those 400 iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell’s apartment. . . .

  Ah . . . nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. But how would the voters react if they knew the President of the United States was presiding over “a complex, far-reaching and sinister operation on the part of White House aides and the Nixon campaign organization . . . involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their families and persistent efforts to lay the basis for possible blackmail and intimidation.”

  “Ominous” is not quite the right word for a situation where one of the most consistently unpopular politicians in American history suddenly skyrockets to Folk Hero status while his closest advisors are being caught almost daily in nazi-style gigs that would have embarrassed Adolph Eichmann.

  SANDY BERGER was a speechwriter for McGovern.

  My most vivid memory of him is the day after the campaign. We had spent election night in Sioux Falls, South Dakota . . . or Sioux City, South Dakota . . . or Rapid City, South Dakota. In any case, it was South Dakota. It was a devastating loss, obviously—forty-nine states—and we all flew back to Washington on the charter the next day. My wife came to meet the plane, and right as we arrived back in town, Hunter said, “Yeah—I need a ride,” and so did a couple other p
eople. So we all packed into the car with my wife, and I started driving out of National Airport when somebody said, “Oh, my God! I left my suitcase on the tarmac.” I made a U-turn in the road going out from the airport—up over a curb and over a concrete island—and started driving back to the airport. If you read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter took that little snapshot and used it as a metaphor to show the nihilism and despair of the McGovern campaign staffers after the campaign. Here I was basically prepared to kill myself to go back and get a suitcase. I think it’s a good example of Hunter’s technique, which was to take some event and then explode it into a story line that was compatible with the story already in his own mind. We were defeated, despairing and dispirited. Well, actually we were just exhausted. It was the quickest way to get back to the airport, right? But for Hunter, what I did was a kind of existential act at that point.

  GEORGE MCGOVERN

  He flew into Washington the week after the campaign ended. His book was almost done the day we voted, but he had a couple more questions he wanted to put to me, so I had one final interview with him in my office. He teared up more than once. He took it very hard. There was no question in my mind that he grieved over it, and that he was serious. He alternated between a sort of sweet fury and genuine grief. He couldn’t even stand to look at me.

  PAT CADDELL

  A year later, we all had a party at the McGovern house in Washington. It was a big one. Afterward, Hunter and I and Warren Beatty were in this car, and Hunter was racing down the street with a bottle of Wild Turkey between his legs. He literally drove a police car off the road. “Hunter, that was a cop!” I said. He went, “Holy shit!” And out the window goes the bottle.

  We finally pulled up to this bar and started to get out to go inside—except Hunter forgot to put the car in park, and the car rolled straight into a row of motorcycles owned by these tough-looking Puerto Ricans. Hunter started jabbering something apologetic to these guys, and we all jumped back in the car and raced deep into the Maryland suburbs and ducked into a driveway to hide from the cops. They were still constructing I-95, and somehow Hunter managed to get into the construction—he said it was some kind of shortcut—and almost drove off a half-finished bridge into the Potomac. He was jumping medians and scaring the shit out of everybody. I remember looking at Warren, who was whiter than a sheet.

  That evening—or morning—ended with Hunter driving to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where Nixon was being treated for viral pneumonia, and walking up to the front desk with his fairly official-looking kit bag with him and saying to the receptionist, “I’m Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, here to treat the president.”

  TIM FERRIS

  I spent a lot of time with Hunter at his home and in various hotels and all that, and certainly he was a theatrical guy, but I don’t think he was playing up his alcohol or drug use. It was constant. I mean, I’ve never been with him in any setting in which he wasn’t drinking or taking drugs—well, very rarely. The exception is when we used to work out down at the Watergate Hotel gym. We did some weight-lifting, but Hunter always liked swimming more than anything else, so we did that. And then we’d go up to that little Watergate bar and get ripped.

  Around that time, I was leaving New York to go on tour with David Bowie. Jann was in New York, and we had had a meeting. I had my bag with me because I was on my way to the airport, and Jann fired me—which happened periodically in downturns. When I called Owl Farm, Sandy answered and said that she had just spoken to Hunter, who was in his room at the Watergate. I asked her how things were going, and she said, “Pretty well, but we’re worried about money. That’s what we were just talking about. We only have four hundred dollars left in the bank and we don’t know where any more money is going to come from.” We talked a bit more, and then I hung up and immediately called Hunter. He said, “How’s it going?” I said, “I just got fired by Jann.” And Hunter said, “Do you need any money? I can lend you four hundred dollars.”

  GEORGE MCGOVERN

  I thought Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail was remarkable. You may have heard Frank Mankiewicz’s famous quote from when that book came out—“It’s the most accurate and least factual book about the campaign”—and there was some truth in that. He had a lot of insights that I think were on target. There are some that weren’t, but that’s true of everything.

  After the campaign, every now and then I’d get a big scrawled fax from him. He might write six words on an entire sheet of paper—just goofy stuff that I couldn’t make sense of sometimes. The scrawl would cover the top of the page and then run to the bottom, usually at a forty-five-degree angle. I saved them. He’d call me once in a while, and I called him. Sometimes I’d get up in the morning and there’d be a message that he had called, and the message box would indicate that it came in at four o’clock in the morning.

  PAUL SCANLON

  I was Tim Crouse’s editor on “The Boys on the Bus” article. And a year or so after both of their stories had come out, Hunter was the toast of everything in sight. There’d be these journalism conventions in New York and Washington that a bunch of us would fly out to. I’d meet all these guys from the Washington press corps, and they would go on about, “Oh, my best friend Hunter . . .”—Hunter this, Hunter that. I finally ran into Hunter, and I said, “Jesus Christ! Everybody in the Washington press corps is your best friend!” He just gave me that kind of half-cocked smile.

  SANDY THOMPSON

  A long time ago, he really didn’t want to become the gonzo person. He wanted to be read and thought of as a serious human being, a serious writer. And what happened was different. I mean, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hell’s Angels—he rewrote and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote those. He had a lot of pride in those. With Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, things were beginning to get harder for him.

  There were editors who would piece things together for him, which he had never had to do. He didn’t want editors to even touch his stuff, never mind fit the pieces together and then string transitions to hold those things together. That’s not what he had meant for himself.

  JANN WENNER

  You had to get him started writing his pieces on location from wherever he was on assignment. He had to get the feel and the groove going there—and it usually began with the weather. He had to describe what the town looked like, what the motel looked like, if the rain was beating down, what the waves were doing. If he didn’t get the geography and the weather established and get at least some chunk of the narrative going, you were in trouble. You had to keep him there until that was done, so that meant sending him the Selectric typewriter and the mojo wire. Even if the deadline wasn’t for two months, you had to keep an ongoing writing schedule with him. You couldn’t go away and then come back and say, “Give me your pages in a week.”

  He could always sniff out the fucking deadline. Over all the years, every single time I’d try to give him a slightly fake deadline—and sometimes a double-fake deadline, knowing he’d sniff out the first one—he would always find out.

  He needed his audience and his editor there on the spot, and it was too much for any one person to handle. There was always going to be me and some combination of people on every piece. No matter how hard I tried to delegate the work—even knowing full well I’d come back and do the final edit—he wouldn’t let me off the hook for more than a day or two before people were running to me and I would have to step in and start orchestrating everything.

  A few days into a piece, I’d say, “Well, we have a lead. We’re cool with the lead.” I’d start writing headlines and subheds for various sections, and Hunter would start labeling the inserts by letter combinations. Sometimes he’d name the inserts if the letters weren’t working. Early on, it would just be “Insert A” or “Insert B.” Later we’d start getting to “Insert ZZ” or “Insert X-Ray.” You always had to save time for him to write transitions. He needed someone to organize that for him because he was always so up against the deadline he did
n’t have time to do it himself.

  You needed to know his rhythm, and you needed to know your pharmacology—what he was taking, what you shouldn’t be feeding him or allowing him to eat. In addition to me managing the whole show, there would be an assistant here, and at his end he had his assistant, so there were at least four people in this drama.

  Hunter understood what I was trying to do, which was give him somebody to talk to at two in the morning because I didn’t want to do it, but until I entered the picture, he really wasn’t going to hit fourth gear. He’d do the basics, but he wasn’t really going to do the big stuff unless it was going to inconvenience me. Just knowing that I was at the other end, pacing around and being kept up and troubled, was meaningful and necessary in his mind. His attitude was that if I was going to get the fine stuff, I had to pay for it, or show how much I loved it, and we were in this together, no matter the hour; buy the ticket, take the ride.

  You’d start laying the whip on a week or two weeks before the final deadline. You had to have a feel for just how much physical stamina everybody had left. You had precious natural resources here—limited natural resources—and you wanted to use them wisely. You knew that on deadline there were still going to be pieces of the story missing that you weren’t going to be able to publish because he still hadn’t written them. He’d planned to write them, but you had to say, “In the three days we have left—in the seventy-two hours of writing skill, drug stamina, and sheer physical strength on his part—we will have to do triage here.”

  You had to know when to say, “Okay, look, Hunter. It’s time for ‘the Wisdom,’” which was essentially the wrap-up where he reached his conclusions and imparted his vision. Sometimes he’d write this very early. In the early days, the end of the piece might be the first thing he had written. Usually he would start off in the middle somewhere with a scene that he liked and that he was comfortable with, that he knew he could get flowing right. He’d write that and then see where it went. It all depended on how much time he had.