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  “To Juan and…”

  “To Richard Milhous Nixon, who never let me down.”

  H.S.T.

  “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

  —Raoul Duke

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint the articles and excerpts listed: Boston Globe

  “Memoirs of a Wretched Weekend in Washington” by Hunter S. Thompson, February 23, 1969; reprinted by permission of the Boston Globe.

  Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

  “A Footloose American in a Smugglers’ Den” by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National Observer, © Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1962; all rights reserved.

  “Chatty Letters During a Journey from Aruba to Rio” by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National Observer, © Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1962; all rights reserved.

  “Democracy Dies in Peru, But Few Seem to Mourn Its Passing” by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National Observer, © Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1962; all rights reserved.

  “Living in the Time of Alger, Greeley, Debs” by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National Observer, © Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1964; all rights reserved.

  “The Catch Is Limited in Indians’ ‘Fish-in’ ” by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National Observer, © Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1964; all rights reserved.

  “The Inca of the Andes” by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National Observer, © Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1963; all rights reserved.

  “What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum” by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National Observer, © Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1964; all rights reserved.

  “When the Beatniks Were Social Lions” by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National Observer, © Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1964; all rights reserved.

  “Why Anti-Gringo Winds Often Blow South of the Border” by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The National Observer, © Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 1963; all rights reserved.

  The Nation

  “The Nonstudent Left” by Hunter Thompson, copyright © 1965 by Hunter Thompson; originally appeared in The Nation.

  The New York Times Company, Inc.

  “Fear and Loathing in the Bunker” by Hunter Thompson, copyright © 1974 by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The New York Times.

  “The ‘Hashbury’ Is the Capital of the Hippies” by Hunter Thompson, copyright © 1967 by Hunter Thompson; reprinted by permission of The New York Times.

  Playboy Press

  “The Great Shark Hunt” by Hunter S. Thompson, copyright © 1974 by Hunter S. Thompson; originally appeared in Playboy magazine.

  Random House, Inc.

  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson, copyright © 1972 by Hunter Thompson, reprinted with permission of Random House, Inc.

  Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson, copyright © 1966, 1967 by Hunter S. Thompson; reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

  The Reporter

  “A Southern City with Northern Problems” by Hunter Thompson, copyright © 1963 by Hunter S. Thompson; originally published by The Reporter.

  Rolling Stone Press

  America by Ralph Steadman, copyright © 1974 by Ralph Steadman; reprinted by permission of Rolling Stone Press.

  “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat” by Hunter S. Thompson, copyright © 1977 by Hunter S. Thompson; originally published by Rolling Stone magazine.

  “The Battle of Aspen” by Hunter S. Thompson, copyright © 1970 by Hunter S. Thompson; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

  “Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises” by Hunter Thompson, copyright © 1974 by Hunter Thompson; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

  “Fear and Loathing at the Superbowl: No Rest for the Wretched” by Hunter Thompson, copyright © 1974 by Hunter Thompson; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

  “Fear and Loathing in Washington: The Boys in the Bag” by Hunter S. Thompson, copyright © 1974 by Hunter S. Thompson; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

  “Fear and Loathing at Watergate: Mr. Nixon Has Cashed His Check” by Hunter Thompson, copyright © 1973 by Hunter Thompson; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

  “Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith” by Hunter Thompson, copyright © 1976 by Hunter S. Thompson; originally published by Rolling Stone magazine.

  “Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Near Room” by Hunter S. Thompson, copyright © 1978 by Hunter S. Thompson; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

  “Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Far Room” by Hunter S. Thompson, copyright © 1978 by Hunter S. Thompson; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

  “Memo from the Sports Desk: The So-called ‘Jesus-Freak’ Scare” by Hunter S. Thompson, copyright © 1971 by Hunter S. Thompson; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

  “Memo from the Sports Desk & Rude Notes from a Depression Chamber in Miami” by Hunter Thompson, copyright © 1973 by Hunter Thompson; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

  “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan” by Hunter Thompson, copyright © 1971 by Hunter Thompson; originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

  Straight Arrow Books

  Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, copyright © 1973 by Hunter S. Thompson; originally published by Straight Arrow Books.

  TEARS AND LOATHING

  AN INTRODUCTION BY

  JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

  I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, with a father who wrote about sports for the Louisville Courier Journal and who revered (often to a fault) the so-called “gonzo journalism” of the late sixties and early seventies, so the figure of Hunter S. Thompson held some power in my imagination before I had a chance to like or reject him.

  Thompson had a connection with the Courier Journal on two levels, as both subject and contributor. In the summer of 1955, at the age of seventeen, he became a running news item in that paper’s local pages. He had been somewhat ambiguously involved in a robbery in the city’s Cherokee Park neighborhood, and his case came before the juvenile court. He was represented by the brilliant Lebanese American attorney Frank Haddad Jr., “the Perry Mason of Louisville.” (I met Haddad in the eighties—my cousin was his chief legal researcher for decades.)

  Thompson’s hearing was highly emotional. The judge felt torn. On one hand, it emerged that Thompson had actually tried to stop the robbery. He did arrive in the car with the two perpetrators, but as the crime was in progress, he climbed out and tried to calm things down. Two of the girls who’d been robbed even showed up on his behalf in court, saying that they had come to know him since that night and he was a good guy. Thompson’s mother cried for him in court. Thompson cried, too. It is unlikely that he enjoyed seeing himself described as a “Tearful Youth” in a Courier Journal headline the next morning. There was some “long and emotional pleading” by Haddad, who always had a dramatic touch. Much was made of the early death of Thompson’s father only three years before. All of which inclined the judge to sympathy. On the other hand, young Thompson already possessed a criminal record. The boy “had been before the court many times as a result of three previous arrests”—for drinking underage and destruction of property—and he “had always promised to mend his ways, but never had.” There was no choice. The judge gave Thompson sixty days in the county jail. As he pronounced the sentence, the boy’s mother wailed. One of the girls blurted out, “But he tried to help us!”

  Five years later, Thompson was once again in the Courier Journal, but this time as a journalist filing one of his first significant stories. His byline identifies him as a “Courier Journal Special Writer,” corresponding from Puerto Rico. Thompson lived part of that year, 1960, on the island—he had moved there to write for a sports magazine, which folded almost as soon as he arrived—and the article, headlined “Munoz Skillfully Keeps Foes Off-Balance,” is a profile of then-governor Luis Munoz Marin, whom Thompson describes as “like a grizzly bear fighting a band of pygmies.” A fairly lame simile. There’s a reason the piece does not appear in this anthology, where it would otherwise belong. Thompson had not yet located his style when he wrote that. For one thing, he hadn’t experienced his astonishing encounter with the prose of Terry Southern, which changed him (as it did many of the other so-called New Journalists, down to the present day). Southern’s great 1963 story for Esquire, “Twirling at Ole Miss,” introduced a whole tone into American writing, a way of wielding the first-person as a drunken flashlight, an “I” so stylized that to ask if it veered into fiction was some kind of theoretical question. A decade later, Thompson was still reeling from the “incredible influence” that Southern’s voice had exerted on his work. Read Thompson’s own 1970 report, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” included here, to see what use he made of that inspiration. More than half a century old, th
e piece remains amusing and strange. The classic Thompson moves are there, the index transgressions of gonzoism, the fucking with subjects and sources to generate effects—as when Thompson convinces Jimbo, a good-old-boy he meets at a Louisville bar, that the Black Panthers are planning to disrupt that year’s Derby with a race riot, causing Jimbo to moan absurdly, “ ‘Why here? Don’t they respect anything?’ ”—also the sudden swerves in perspective that leave us wondering who or what is speaking (“bursts of madness and filigree,” Thompson called them), as when Jimbo assures him that “there’s women in this town that’ll do anything for money,” and Thompson muses, “Why not? Money is a good thing to have in these twisted times.”

  A piece that intrigues me here is “The Ultimate Freelancer,” an obituary-profile of the journalist Lionel Olay, a sort of proto-New Journalist of the late fifties and early sixties. Olay had written some interesting dispatches from Cuba and did an interview with Alduous Huxley (for the magazine Cavalier), which is still quoted sometimes. In it, Huxley articulated his theory of “universal sentience”:

  [T]he fact that we have an intelligence means that some potentiality of intelligence is in all matter. All matter has an inside and an outside. The outside is material, and the inside, on a low level of organisation, is psychoid. It’s capable, when it’s highly organized, of becoming fully psychic and psychological.1

  Olay is remembered today because Thompson admired him, sort of like how the magazine writer Thomas Beer’s reputation has survived through Faulkner’s having praised him in interviews. Thompson looked up to Olay, or saw a potential working model, anyway, in the latter’s hallucinogenic, deadline-haunted existence. He mentions Olay in two other, later pieces collected in this book (“Epitaph,” from 1973, and “Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith,” from 1976), as well as in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The two men met in California in 1960—that same, pivotal year in Thompson’s life, after he had lived for some months in Puerto Rico. They both liked to soak in the hot springs at Big Sur, where Thompson lived briefly as a caretaker on an estate. Their friendship lasted until Olay’s death, of a stroke, in December of 1966. Just a year after that, Thompson’s first book was published—Hell’s Angels, his account of a period spent embedded with the notorious motorcycle gang—meaning that the elegy for Olay was written right as Thompson was becoming something different than Olay had been, a “real writer,” not a freelancer anymore.

  Thompson’s piece on Olay is interesting for the element of self-portraiture it inevitably contains and in how it seems to represent the first out-flashings of his gonzo tone,2 three years before the famous Derby story. In remembering Olay’s persona, Thompson begins to craft one for himself. He borrows a mask and adapts it. The essay takes the form of a letter to the editor of a magazine called The Distant Drummer, a radical-hippie publication in Philadelphia. Thompson sounds stoned and angry. He reminds the mag that he has asked them twice to send him a copy of a piece that Olay wrote about Lenny Bruce, and twice they have ignored him, which seems to Thompson a perfect example of “the cheap, mean, grinning-hippie capitalism that pervades the whole New Scene.” (Raoul Duke lurches toward us and lunges at us from the journalistic protoplasm.)

  This collection was originally published in 1979, at the end of the decade of Nixon/Ford/Carter, mere months before the rise of Reagan and with him the dawn of whatever anti-reality we now share. The political landscape of the book exists between the poles of Nixon and Carter. Thompson’s analysis cannot be accused of subtlety. Nixon was “a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president,” whereas the writer loved Jimmy Carter. And not in a cynical way. He sincerely believed in the sincerity of Carter’s message. The famous piece he wrote about Carter for Rolling Stone is practically propaganda. Almost literally so: long sections of Carter’s 1974 “Law Day” speech in Atlanta (“a king-hell bastard of a speech,” Thompson called it) are quoted without hesitation or cavil, and for The Great Shark Hunt, Thompson chose to have the entire speech reproduced. He became an actual friend of Carter’s, and sober persons have argued that he played a small role in helping to legitimize Carter as a viable candidate for the White House, simply by taking him very seriously. On one level, we can look at it as the greatest gonzo experiment of all time, and given that Thompson chose the right side, a redeeming one.

  It’s interesting to look at the reviews from when this book was first published and see critics already talking, in 1979, about the limitations and ultimate hollowness of Thompson’s “pose.” I thought of him as being in his prime at that time, but he had been seen as a creature of the sixties, I suppose, and the schtick already seemed musty to some. That critique was the one most commonly leveled against him, throughout his career—it’s the one I’ve heard all my life, and that never failed to get a defensive rise out of my father—that Thompson’s face had somehow become frozen inside the gonzo mask, that the fame and drugs kept his work from evolving into real literature, at the level for which his talents otherwise equipped him. Maybe that’s true. But people who thrive on subjective distinctions like that tend to be selling something or trying to convince themselves of something, and it seems equally likely that he would never have written a word without the rest of it.

  It’s as a humorist that Thompson must sink or swim, reputation-wise. As long as he can make us laugh, he’ll continue to be read. I’m pretty sure the Kentucky Derby piece will remain funny when the world ends, which, granted, may not give it much time. He is rarely funnier than when grossly insulting a public figure. This book ripples with memorable epithets. Kentucky governor Louie Nunn is a “Swinish neo-nazi hack,” and Georgia governor Lester Maddox a “White trash dingbat.” The citizens of Chicago are a “Monument to everything cruel and stupid and corrupt in the human spirit,” and Chicago mayor Richard Daley “looks like a potato with mange.” Liberals are “Petulant, linthead bastards.” Former White House counsel John Dean is a “Crafty little ferret,” and Lyndon B. Johnson a “Vicious liar with the ugliest family in Christendom.” The actor George Hamilton is a “Stinking animal ridiculed even in Hollywood.” As for the governor of California, Ronald Reagan? He’s “straight out of a George Grosz painting, a political freak in every sense of the word.” Richard Nixon is a “Whimpering, gin-soaked vegetable” and a “borderline psychotic with the brain of a small-time chiseler.” He is also a “Pompous, plastic little fart.” The vice president under Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, is a “Treacherous, brain-damaged old vulture.” Gerald Ford is “almost too stupid to lie.”

  “Jesus,” Thompson wrote, thinking about his mentor Olay, “no wonder Lionel had a stroke.” It was an era when keeping your sense of humor represented a moral victory, one of many things it had in common with our own. It still is.

  1 This passage is quoted in a PhD dissertation submitted at the University of Kent, in 2012, by a Huxley scholar named Reanne Crane. The title: Aldous Huxley’s Island Revisited: Psychedelics and the Semantics of Perception and Belief.

  2 The scholar Bill Reynolds, in an essay titled “On the Road to Gonzo: Hunter S. Thompson’s Early Literary Journalism (1961–1970),” describes the Olay tribute as “an early, outlandish example of Thompson exerting torque on his voice” (Literary Journalism Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 2012).

  I

  Author’s Note

  “Art is long and life is short,

  and success is very far off.”

  —J. Conrad

  Well… yes, and here we go again.

  But before we get to The Work, as it were, I want to make sure I know how to cope with this elegant typewriter—(and, yes, it appears that I do)—so why not make this quick list of my life’s work and then get the hell out of town on the 11:05 to Denver? Indeed. Why not?

  But for just a moment I’d like to say, for the permanent record, that it is a very strange feeling to be a 40-year-old American writer in this century and sitting alone in this huge building on Fifth Avenue in New York at one o’clock in the morning on the night before Christmas Eve, 2000 miles from home, and compiling a table of contents for a book of my own Collected Works in an office with a tall glass door that leads out to a big terrace looking down on The Plaza Fountain.