HUNTER S. THOMPSON: DEATH OF AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL

Artist Meets The Man

'Those Weird And Twisted Nights' Was How It All Started

Hunter Thompson said these words to me many years ago: "I would feel real
trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time. "
I knew he meant it. It wasn't a case of if, but when. He didn't reckon he
would make it beyond 30 anyway, so he lived it all in the fast lane. There
was no first, second, third and top gear in the car -- just overdrive.

He was in a hurry. "Drive your stake into a darkened heart in a red
Mercedes-Benz. The blackness hides a speeding tramp. The savage breast
pretends. But never mind the nights, my love, because they never really
happened anyway."

So we wrote in a Beverly Hills house one drunken night. I wrote the
stanzas, he wrote the chorus. "Don't write, Ralph," he said, "you'll bring
shame on your family."

"Those Weird and Twisted Nights." That was the song.

On Sunday morning, I had just finished signing the 1,200 title pages for a
limited-edition Taschen version of "The Curse of LONO," which Hunter had
signed so uncharacteristically -- obedient and mechanical -- over the month
of December.

I thought that was very strange. He has to be cajoled like a child to do
anything like that, so I drew his portrait across the last sheet, glaring
out, his two eyes in the two Os of LONO, put the cigarette holder with the
long Dunhill prodding upward in his grimacing mouth, signed it with an
extra flourish and closed the last of the four boxes. The old bastard! He
waited to make sure I had finished the task. Then he signed himself off.

I knew it was too good to be true. Now I would be expected to build the
monstrous cannon in Woody Creek, a 100 foot-high column of steel tubes,
with the big red fist on its top and his ashes placed in a fire bomb in its
palm.

"Two thumbs, Ralph! Don't forget the two thumbs!!" It was the gonzo fist,
and he really believes I can do it! Such were his demands as he tipped at
his windmills.

I had only just arrived in America in late April 1970, and was staying with
a friend in the Hamptons to decompress. I got a call from JC Suares, art
editor of Scanlan's Magazine in New York.

He said: "How'd ya like to go to the Kentucky Derby with an ex-Hell's Angel
who just shaved his head, and cover the race? His name is Hunter S.
Thompson, and he wants an artist to nail the decadent, depraved faces of
the local establishment who meet there. He doesn't want a photographer. He
wants something weird, and we've seen your work."

The editor, Don Goddard, had been the New York Times' foreign editor, and
he thought I was naive enough to take this on. I was looking for work -- so
I went.

Finding Hunter -- or indeed anyone covering the prestigious Kentucky Derby
who is not a bona fide registered journalist -- was no easy matter, and
trying to explain my reasons for being there was even worse, especially as
I was under the impression that this was an official trip and I was an
accredited press man.

Why shouldn't I think that? I assumed that Scanlan's was an established
magazine. I had been watching someone chalk racing results on a blackboard
while I sipped a beer, and I was about to turn and get myself another, when
a voice like no other I had ever heard cut into my thoughts and sank its
teeth into my brain. It was a cross between a slurred karate chop and
gritty molasses.

"Um-er, you-er wouldn't be from England, er, would you-er? An artist
maybe-er -what the ...!"

I had turned around, and two fierce eyes, firmly socketed inside a
bullet-shaped head, were staring at a strange growth I was nurturing on the
end of my chin.

"Holy s -- !" he exclaimed. "They said I was looking for a matted-haired
geek with string warts, and I guess I've found him."

We took a beer together and sat in the press box. Somehow, he had got our
accreditation and we were in. He asked me if I gambled, and I said only
once, in 1952. I put two shillings on Early Mist to win in the 1953 Grand
National. And it did.

I picked a horse but didn't bet and it won, so then I picked another,
backed it with a dollar, and lost. "That's why I don't gamble," I said.

"I thought you had been picked up," he replied. "Picked up?" I didn't quite
understand. "Er, yes, the police here are pretty keen. They tend to take an
interest in something different. The, er-um, the beard. Not many of them
around these parts. Not these days anyway."

I was beginning to take in the whole of the man's appearance, and his was a
little different, too. Certainly not what I was expecting.

No time-worn leather, shining with old sump oil. No manic tattoo across a
bare upper arm and, strangely, no hint of menace.

This man had an impressive head chiseled from one piece of bone, and the
top part was covered down to his eyes by a floppy brimmed sun-hat. His top
half was draped in a loose-fitting hunting jacket of multicolored
patchwork. He wore seersucker blue pants, and the whole torso was pivoted
on a pair of huge white plimsolls with a fine red trim around the
bulkheads. Damn near 6- foot-6 inches of solid bone and meat holding a
beaten-up leather bag across his knee and a loaded cigarette holder between
the arthritic fingers of his other hand.

We found the decadent, depraved faces of Louisville by the end of the first
week we spent together. They were staring at us from a mirror in the gents'
toilet on the infield, where the rest of the riff-raff, who are not
eligible to stand in the privileged boxes of the chosen few, spent their
time at the races, just like us.

We spent many assignments together, bucking the trend, against the cheats
and liars, the bagmen and the cronies; me an alien from the old country and
him raging against the coming of the light.

Before "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," we tried to cover the America's
Cup yacht race in Rhode Island for Scanlan's (which was just about to go
bust and get onto Richard Nixon's blacklist) from a three-masted schooner.

There was a rock band on board for distraction; booze and, for Hunter,
whatever he was gobbling at the time. I was seasick, and Hunter was fine. I
asked him what he was taking, and he gave me one.

It was psilocybin (magic mushroom), a psychedelic hallucinogen, my first
and only drug trip apart from Librium. I was the artist from England, so I
had a job to do. He handed me two spray-paint canisters.

"What do I do with these?"

"You're the artist, Ralph. Do what you want, but you must do it on the side
of one of those multimillion-dollar yachts, moored hardly 50 yards away
from where we are."

"How about 'F -- the Pope?' " I said, now seeing in my mind red snarling
dogs attacking a musician dressed as a nun singing at a piano at a
shore-bound bar. "Are you a Catholic, Ralph?"

"No," I replied, "it's just the first thing that came to mind."

So that was the plan, and we made it to the boats, and I stood up in the
little dinghy with the spray cans and shook them, as one does.

They made a clicking sound and alerted a guard. "We must flee, Ralph!
There'll be pigs everywhere. We have failed." He pulled fiercely on the
oars and fell backward with legs in the air. He righted himself and started
rowing again.

We made it back to our boat, and while I was gabbling insanely, he was
writing down all the gibberish that I uttered. I was now a basket case, and
we had to get back to shore and flee. Hunter shot off two distress flares
into the harbor, and we hailed a boat just coming in.

The flares set fire to one of the boats, causing an emergency fire rescue
as we got to dry land. There's more, and I won't go on, but I guess that
was the genesis of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

I had the good fortune to meet one of the great originals of American
literature. Maybe he is the Mark Twain of the late 20th century. Time will
sort the bastard out.