FEAR AND LOATHING

GONZO

The Life of Hunter S. Thompson

An Oral Biography

By Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour

Little, Brown. 467 pp. $28.99

Reading "Gonzo" takes us back to a counterculture moment in U.S.
history that seemed very modern and cutting-edge at the time but was
still taking its cues from the rhetoric of Hemingway. It was a time in
America when many men were he-men and proud of it: The really
masculine ones fought wars, scaled mountains, built bridges. The
mid-list guys found bars where they could beat each other up, drove
100 miles an hour through hairpin turns, laboriously dragged their
couches out onto the front lawn, where they could set them on fire.
Those were men's adventures; adventurous women tested their mettle by
hooking up with abusive men and finding out just how much abuse they
could take.

It was also still a world where, despite the rise of feminism, men got
to write the books and their loving spouses got to type them -- or to
take dead-end jobs to bring in some money so that the men could stay
at home, stare at their typewriters, type pages, pull them out with
drama and flair, ball them up and throw them across the room, then
pour another drink, or roll another joint. Nobody's fault! That's just
the way the culture was. Almost everybody in those beatnik/hippie days
bought into it.

Full disclosure: I know some of the people in this book. Also, since
Hunter Thompson shot himself through the throat in his own house with
a .45, leaving his son to find the body and the unholy mess it must
have made, I must also disclose that my paternal grandmother shot her
own head off with a shotgun, leaving my father to find the body. I
have a strong bias against people who blow their heads off in the
house. It's a mean thing to do, maybe the meanest thing you can do in
a family, and you'd better have a pretty good reason -- or, at least,
be an amazing writer -- to justify that kind of action. Jann Wenner,
who edited this oral biography with a former editorial assistant and
who has the interests of Rolling Stone magazine at heart, focuses on
many family members and friends of Hunter Thompson's who insist he was
a "genius," but the reality of his life was perhaps more complex and
sad than the use of that word might imply. Maybe Thompson just wrote a
few books and magazine pieces that perfectly reflected the zeitgeist,
then got caught up in the self-destructive persona he had created, and
dribbled a good part of his life away.

He was born in Louisville, one of three sons of a widowed woman. He
is variously described as a leader or a bully in his youth. He threw
stones and stole toy soldiers, shoplifted, broke into liquor stores
and became pretty handy with a gun. He ran with a rich crowd, and
when a bunch of them got arrested in their senior year of high
school, the rich boys' dads bailed their sons out. Thompson had to
settle for the Air Force, and it rankled him. He soon found a
beautiful girl, Sandy, who would be his wife for 17 years. "I washed
clothes," she remembers, "I fed him. I gave him feedback on The Rum
Diary. I took care of him and made love." She declared herself madly
in love and dedicated her life to him. They traveled to South
America, Puerto Rico, Big Sur, and ended up in Aspen, on a farm with
peacocks and other animals. They did a lot of drugs. But Hunter would
stay up two or three days and nights at a time, and hurl abuse at his
wife and the help, and go after his little kid with a cattle prod
(just kidding, of course), and was notoriously unfaithful. He got
some magazine assignments, hooked up with the Hell's Angels, wrote a
book about them, got beat up and elicited this from the notorious
Sonny Barger: "I don't think that people realize that just because
you're really good at something, it doesn't mean you're a good
person." This, from a scandalized Hell's Angel.

Then came "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," which Thompson and Wenner
turned into a franchise: Fear and Loathing in this, that and the other
thing. Thompson took to wearing costumes and lipstick and brandished
Tasers and tire irons as well as his arsenal of guns. He set off
bombs. He never made a phone call in the daytime if he could make it
at 3 in the morning. He got in motorcycle accidents and set things on
fire. He named F. Scott Fitzgerald as his literary idol but acted like
a poor man's Hemingway-in-Cuba. Writer's block and various physical
ailments set in.

Wenner is interesting for what he leaves out here. Charlie Perry is
identified as Rolling Stone's "first copy editor"; in fact he's an
eminent scholar of Persian cuisine. Grover Lewis, who many thought was
the real genius-writer of Rolling Stone, is referred to here only as
"another editor." David Hickey, another Rolling Stone writer, who went
on to write the esteemed "Air Guitar," evidently has his own opinions
about Thompson but was not consulted.

What's important is not how bad he was as a man but how good he was as
a writer. "Hell's Angels" and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" are
swell. But isn't the rest imitation and self-parody? For hyperbolic
journalism, doesn't Tom Wolfe beat Thompson by a mile, and for
beautifully crafted journalistic art, doesn't Grover Lewis just wham
him? Thompson was loved all right, by bad boys who wanted to get
speeding tickets and stay up all night and add ether to their
repertoire of drugs. No wonder Thompson was mad when he died. He
should have taken it outside, and spared the furniture.