August

[Sweder]

Never meet your heroes; you might not like what you find.

It’s good advice; there’s nothing so fragile as adoration, more so when the focus of one’s idolatry is a very public figure. Chances are something – or more likely someone – will surface to shatter your illusions, usually in exchange for some filthy Fleet Street lucre.

There was never much chance of me meeting Hunter S Thompson.
The Great Gonzo, author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, insightful political commentator and friend to the great and the good in New York, Hollywood and Aspen, put a .45 slug through the back of his mouth on 19th February 2005. I went in search of this mythical creature the only way possible; through his writing and that of those around him. I had to know more. I’ve read Hunter increasingly over the past few years, getting beyond the hedonistic romp of Vegas and wading, elbows deep, into the murky waters of the US Presidential campaigns of ’68, ’72 and ’92. Through Thompsons’ omnipresent shades Republican and Democratic monsters roam the United States, bloated with plagiarism and mendacity, coffers swollen with funds from the rich and the power-hungry.

I have a fault – one of many, I’m told – and this one drives Mrs S up the wall. I have a tendency to, when traveling, pick up and emulate local accents. I recognise this as salesmans’ disease, the unconscious attempt to put your audience at their ease. I don’t recommend it, for as with my good lady when worlds collide and you slip into a spongy Texan twang, those that know the real you will recoil in horror and forever treat you with suspicion. The point is this defect creeps into my writing too. Having immersed myself in the world of Thompson and Steadman I have, unwittingly, adopted some mannerisms, if not the brilliance, of the Good Doctor and his pen-wielding accomplice. There’s no harm, no foul as the Americans would say; it’s not a deliberate attempt to hijack a style. I’d have to ingest copious amounts of pharmaceuticals and develop a love of Chivas Regal to even think about copying Thompson. Yet it irks me that I find myself cursing in Hunterese, or thinking of things in his twisted terms. Twisted is indeed an oft-used HST term.

But I digress; the reason for my piece is this. Where Thompson was fuelled by industrial amounts of cocaine, LSD, mescaline and whiskey the inspiration for my output lives in the hills. Without running my writing engine cools, pinking in that alarming very-hot-metal-cooling kind of way. Panic ensues; can I write without running? What if my knee injury is in some way irreconcilable? Is this the end of my short foray into cyberwaffle? So, dear friends, this is a test. Endorphin-less, slightly (well, very) hung over from a night in town with our own Mighty Plodder (the pattern on my garish Hawaiian shirt fighting the intrusion of late night curry stains), I’m trying to convey a warning.

Warning? Oh yes; for in the midst of my journey into the black heart of the American dream I tarried a while in the biography lay-by. The reality surrounding the man who has held me in his literary thrall just as he held all who knew him in life is he could be a quite despicable man, a self-centred narcissist who’s every whim had to be obeyed, an impossible egotist, a drug addict, booze hound and, perhaps saddest of all, an intollerable, black-hearted bully. As time ticked on and his body succumbed to the inhuman weight of decades of debauchery Thompson morphed into parody of himself, a drooling, immobile caricature, loved by the hardy few, hated by some and feared by many. It’s inevitable really; you can’t behave as this man had for so long without trampling friends, girlfriends, editors and fellow journos into the dirt. Alongside the physical decrepitude his one true asset, his writing genius, faded like the details of a waking dream; just there, on the edge of consciousness, deliciously close yet tantalisingly out of reach. Deadlines came and went, missed by minutes or miles. Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone magazine, Thompson’s home in print since its inception in 1971, finally admitted defeat. Reflecting on a stack of stories mistreated and abandoned by his former headliner he bit the bullet, instructing his staff to no longer weed out juicy tales for their talisman. It broke his heart, even more so than when Thompson, now painfully aware of his own mortality, bit a bullet of his own.

Thompson could no longer trust his writing. He’d have friends and associates come to his nest at Owl Farm in the Colorado mountains to read sections of his past works to him, as if wallowing in former glories would somehow invigorate his drug-battered, booze-soaked mojo. More often than not it failed.

I commend Thompson’s work to anyone prepared to be up-ended, to embrace sideways thinking and suspend disbelief. Hunters' view on the world was as warped and bizarre as any I’ve found, yet in his pomp his insight was vital, his ability to cut through the bullshit singular, spiteful and joyous to behold. It speaks volumes that some of his biggest fans were those crusty hard-nosed hacks out there on the campaign trails with him; writers for The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Herald & Tribune. The Rolling Stone obituary for his nemesis, Richard Millhouse Nixon, entitled 'He Was A Crook', ranks as one of the most incredible pieces of writing I've yet to find; it takes your breath away.

If there was a story that summed up Hunters’ approach to the conventional world perhaps this is it.
In the early ‘70’s Rolling Stone was getting itself a reputation. Thompson’s leaders were catching eyes, it’s editor and founder pulling together some prodigious writing talent. They had the trust of some of the world’s leading music makers and were about to arrive on the national political news scene with a wallop. Wenner was looking for investors to help realise his plans for national syndication. One such man, a billionaire who ultimately invested in a small computer-related concern that became Intel, expressed an interest. Wenner set up a lavish dinner at a fancy Aspen eatery and invited Thompson, a writer hugely admired by the potential investor. Hunter had a reputation for tardiness so it was no great surprise when he bounded into the dining hall, dressed as ever in three-quarter trousers, leery shirt, floppy hat and shades, just as the appetisers were arriving.
‘Sorry I’m late’ puffed Thompson, pulling a bundle from his journalists’ satchel.
‘So as not to cause a fuss I’ve taken the liberty of bringing my own food.’
He sat between the two startled men whereupon he unwrapped the package of butcher’s paper to reveal a large bloody liver crawling with maggots.
The ‘investor’ promptly threw back his chair, scrambling for the exit hand to mouth, choking back the horror. Recalling the event Wenner says
‘I was mad as hell yet laughing my ass off – it was so Hunter. He just looked at me in that way of his and said ‘What’d you expect? You know I can’t stand those people.’’

Uncompromising, infuriating, inhuman, incomparable.

I read another book about HST recently; The Joke's Over by his long time, long suffering collaborator Ralph Steadman. It also shone an intrusive spotlight onto Hunter's foibles, though with a good deal more compassion, the understanding of a fellow degenerate and a man who truly loved the man behind the stories. I was moved by this very personal account, to the point that I wrote to Steadman about the book, mentioning in passing that I'd long admired his own work and had 'lost'* a hardback compendium of his political cartoons during a trip to Moscow in 1984.

To my surprise he wrote back, enclosing a signed sketch of Hunter and a hand-written letter, soon to be mounted in pride of place in my office at home. I was made up.

[SIZE="1"]* A saga in itself. For reasons too detailed to go into now I had to bail out of my hotel - the Intourist in Moscow - having no funds, no plastic and a rather unpleasant bill waiting for me at the front desk. I threw my gear - a suitcase containing 30 days of sweaty clobber and a kit bag holding my ATC hobnail boots and said Steadman meisterwerk - into a lurking Lada. US Dollars were waved and we roared off to the airport in a cloud of slush - the Moskva river was frozen over, it was minus 18 degrees and snow covered everything - with me peering anxiously out of the rear window for signs of pursuit, all the while trying to stop my jaw from rebounding off the parcel shelf as the car hammered along badly pitted 'roads'.

I made it to the BA check-in desk, handling over my bags before heading for the bar and a fond farewell to Messrs Stolich and Naya. On arrival at Heathrow I was gutted to learn that the kit bag had been 'pulled' by the authorities at the last minute back in the (then) USSR. Seeing as the book contained some fabulous Steadman classics including rendered ancient, crumbling Soviet premiers, I probably got off lightly. And as Mr Steadman himself says, I'd seen it already. I can't help thinking they would have prized my well-polished hobbies equally if not higher.[/SIZE]