POISON PEN AND INK

THE JOKE'S OVER Bruised Memories: Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson, and Me.
By Ralph Steadman. Illustrated. 396 pp. Harcourt. $26.

The illustrator Ralph Steadman is a brave man. Not only did he
survive humiliation, gunplay and hallucinatory despair through
decades of collaboration with the legendarily difficult journalist
Hunter S. Thompson, he decided to include as the epigraph to his
memoir of those adventures a remark of Thompson's: "Don't write,
Ralph. You'll bring shame on your family."

To follow this with a 400-page ramble is the sort of dare the
prank-loving Thompson, who committed suicide last year, might have
appreciated. For the sake of the Steadman family's honor, it should
be said that "The Joke's Over" features a lot of Steadman's drawings,
though reduced too much from their original size. True, these
pictures don't exactly constitute writing, but they are brilliant.
Splattery explosions of ink, detonated in the presence of politicians
and stolid middle-class citizens, they stand as the mangling visions
of a 20th-century Hogarth. When they originally appeared (usually in
Rolling Stone), lodged amid Thompson's prose, the images served as
the visual equivalent of the writer's "gonzo" -- a term Steadman
defines as "controlled madness" -- explorations of America.

As for Steadman's writing, let's just say it won't bring shame to his
family, but it won't slather the clan with glory either.

At his best, Steadman, who is Welsh, does a passable imitation of
Thompson's mad rants.

They met in 1970 on Thompson's home turf of Louisville, covering the
Kentucky Derby on assignment for the short-lived magazine Scanlan's.
Steadman's drawings -- vicious caricatures of local residents,
including Thompson's brother -- shocked the writer with their predatory vigor.

Thompson, soon to become famous for a similar bloodthirsty tack in
prose, demanded of the artist: "Why must you scribble these filthy
ravings and in broad daylight too? ... This is Kentucky, not skid
row. I love these people.

They are my friends and you treated them like scum." Their first
collaboration ended with the journalist spraying Steadman from a can
of Mace. "We can do without your kind in Kentucky. Now get your bags
and get out, and take your rotten drawings with you!"

Isn't this how all great buddy movies begin?

Of course they were bound to work together again, and they did a few
months later, scoping out the America's Cup in Newport, R.I.
Steadman, a woozy sailor, asked Thompson if he might have one of the
little yellow tablets that he assumed the writer had been taking for
seasickness. Thompson obliged; a colossal acid trip ensued.

The two men decided to jump-start their nonexistent story by
spray-painting profanities deriding the pope on the hulls of
multimillion-dollar racing yachts. Detected, they panicked, nearly
setting a boat on fire with a flare. "Pigs everywhere!" Thompson
cried. "We must flee like hunted animals." Steadman spouted
gibberish, which Thompson avidly recorded in his notebook. "That's
good, Ralph. .. Go on. What else?"

Steadman ended up catching a flight to New York -- no shoes, no socks
and a suitcase containing only dirty underwear and a sketchbook. He
collapsed at a friend's home, where a doctor was summoned and shot
him full of Librium. "This trip ... established a pattern of
journalism, if that is what it was, that cemented my friendship with
Hunter and laid the ground plan for future assignments. ... It
remains a defining moment in the evolution of gonzo and, without
doubt, a dress rehearsal for 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.' For
Hunter, it provided living proof that going crazy as a journalistic
style was possible."

For a few years in the 1970s, it did appear that insanity was a great
career move, that a deranged journalist might fruitfully subvert
tired conventions that kept a writer from injecting himself into his
work. "He was his own best story," Steadman writes. "The Joke's Over"
shows Thompson stumbling and mumbling his way through the early '70s
with the heart of a lawyer for the A.C.L.U. and the brain of an
acidhead. His gift then was not so much for intoxication as for high
dudgeon. Thirty-five years after its publication, "Fear and Loathing
in Las Vegas," illustrated by Steadman at bargain rates (he's still
bitter), holds up as more than a generational relic.

Thompson depicts himself as a drug-taking idealist blundering through
a nightmare, all the while gripping his sanity as tightly as a steering wheel.

Of course, the gonzo journalism that Steadman claims he and Thompson
tripped their way into always amounted to a high-risk proposition.
"The Joke's Over" makes clear that Thompson was always writing about
himself under the influence, that presidential campaigns, for
instance, were just another form of intoxicant, a deranging ordeal
capable of twisting the mind as surely as a tab of LSD. If the self
wasn't up to snuff, the stories could become as tedious as an
overheard cellphone conversation, exercises in terminal narcissism.

The second half of Steadman's memoir, which spans the years from 1980
to Thompson's death, is a sad, sloppy affair, puffed out with faxes
and bad song lyrics.

No writer, it appears, is a hero to his illustrator, at least not
when money is involved.

Their collaboration floundered over ill-fated projects.

Thompson "was much more into deals than personal affection," Steadman
complains.

The prosecutorial details mount.

Seemingly against his own wishes, Steadman indicts Thompson on
matters large and small.

The writer's feet stank because he wore Converse sneakers without socks.

He was unkind to pets; Steadman shows Thompson hauling his mynah bird
Edward out of his cage for refusing to speak, and then berating the
creature. "There is not a bird-God who is going to save you now,
Edward! ... You are doomed!" In Steadman's view, Thompson treated his
young son, Juan, with only slightly more finesse, grabbing him by the
ear and twirling him about the room "like an average-sized cat." And
yet, conflicted to the last, Steadman writes, "I saw nothing
uncommonly vicious." It was "as though the outward signs of distance
and malevolent behavior were put on strictly for visitors."

Indeed, by the end of his life, Thompson had turned himself into a
totem of his own invention, and spent his days rattling the bars
formed by the cage of his celebrity.

His illustrator tries to put the best possible light on the matter,
but betrayed and appalled, he can't. All told, it's not a pretty picture.