|
LETTER FROM LONDON |
 |
|
Gonzo journalism owes
it all to this wildman
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
of TheColumnists.com
My third and final daughter very nearly got no dinner one night because of Gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson. She was only three months old and would not have understood.
It was Paris in the springtime about a hundred years ago and someone had loaned me a dog-eared copy of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” I like offbeat titles, and this was promising, but nothing could have prepared me for such a finely wrought comic masterpiece. They teach it now in college English classes, alongside Hazlitt and Lamb.
At that stage of my life I was pretending to be a deadly serious business journalist, fun factor exactly zero. Secretly I had discovered that a good antidote to the brain-numbing material I was working with was a dip into something by Terry Southern or a long piece in “Rolling Stone” every couple of months. It worked for me.
So when the screaming started at 2 a.m. on that spring morning and I got up to warm the bottle (what a saint I was), I picked up Delphine, 10 pounds of good quality protoplasm, and plugged her mouth with a rubber nipple.
The Thompson book was within reach so I grabbed it to stay awake. It began: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
By page 2, I had almost dropped Delphine. When she finished her bottle I tossed her back in her crib and resumed my wild ride into Las Vegas, bats flying in my face, a trunk full of colourful happy pills and my wisecracking “attorney” at my side.
The writing in this book seemed to be on fire. All at once in the grey light of my living room life became funny, colourful, outrageous, inventive and illegal. I finished the last page as the sun came up and I was energized. I was fortified. I was downright giddy. I felt ready to face another day of pitching business stories to the grim editors of Business Week in New York.
One or two of the editors doubted I had it in me to write a proper BW story. As Thompson had put it once before, referring to other editors: “It was all a dehumanized nightmare. And these raddled cretins have the gall to complain about my deadlines."
I was saddened when he decided last week that he had suffered enough in this world, and he took his own life with a bullet in the brain at his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. I don’t think the world was surprised. Hunter Thompson was never destined to die in his bed.
I couldn’t be more different than Thompson as a person or as a journalist. I don’t take drugs, I don’t own a gun and I don’t wear mirror sunglasses day and night. But I have remained a Thompson fan because part of me wanted to be as wild and crazy as he was. I took up Wild Turkey at his suggestion. And then there was the writing.
He didn’t care about many things but he did take his writing seriously. He wrote 11 books and more magazine and newspaper pieces than anyone has been able to count. Despite his Kentucky origins and his frequent bouts with drugs and booze, he was a hard worker.
His style, which became part of the “new journalism” experiment in the 1970s, always featured himself in the narrative. He was not consistently good--as he got more famous he turned wordy and self-indulgent--but when he tried he could draw you into his story. He once said he worked so hard on the “Las Vegas” book that by the time he sent it off to Vintage Press “there was not a superfluous word in it.” How many authors can make that statement? How many would dare?
Thomson was part journalist, part performer. He tried every mind-altering substance he could get his hands on but somehow managed to avoid getting himself arrested. He had the occasional scrape with the Woody Creek fuzz but they could never quite get him. To bring sanity to law enforcement he once ran for sheriff. Wisely, the townspeople chose someone else. By the end he had become friends with the local police chief.
The New York Times gave Thompson a hero’s obit, 500 words and a big photo, but got it wrong in praising his “acerbic eye for the truth.” I don’t think truth was ever his main aim. Writer Timothy Crouse came closer to capturing him, describing Thompson as a man who wrote to “shock, protest and annoy.”
A quick sampling of his vocabulary reveals his emphasis on fun and provocation. I compiled this list from his collection “The Great Shark Hunt”: weird, rancid, creep, wretch, fiendish, nekkid, faggot, heinous, scumbag, scumbox (seedy hotel), crazed, stoned, zonked, mano a mano, sick, swine, twisted.
He was a comic writer but had all the melancholy that funny men hide under the surface. His friend Robert Sam Anson had this to say: “It is his special curse: to be able to fill his body with alcohol and drugs, and always have it function; never to be able to blot out what he has seen, what he knows. And looking around, he knows that it is over: the revolution, the fighting, the chance to be different.”
Maybe that frustration is what drove him to pull the trigger last week.
In memoriam, I have sent a new copy of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” to Delphine, now 32 and living in Boston. She might as well find out why she was tossed aside all those years ago.
©2005 by Michael Johnson. This column first posted on Feb. 28, 2005.
You
can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Michael Johnson. To send
an email, click here: talkback@thecolumnists.com
|
|
|
Archives |
|
|