And it worked, folks. Between 1962, when I was working for The National Observer and got the first private interview with the new president of Peru in the wake of a military takeover, until 1975 when I failed to get the first interview with the VC/NVA Colonel who orchestrated the fifth-column seizure of Saigon as the last Americans fled, I managed—by using almost any kind of valid or invalid journalistic credentials I could get my hands on—to get myself personally involved in just about everything that interested me: from Berkeley to Chicago, Las Vegas to the White House, shark-fishing, street-fighting, dope-smuggling, Hell’s Angels, Super Bowls, local politics and a few things I’d prefer not to mention until various statutes of limitations expire.
Indeed. Those were good years for almost any kind of journalism; it was the main language of a very public and political decade…. But I suspect it will not be the main language of the 1970s, or at least not for me and most of the people I know. Very few of them subscribe to the same papers or magazines now that they subscribed to five or even two years ago, and even fewer plan to vote in the ’76 general election. Not even the best and most perceptive journalists covering the presidential campaign seem to care who will win it, or why…. And neither do I, for that matter: After ten years of the most intense kind of personal and professional involvement in national politics, it occurs to me now that I could have left it all alone, and—except for my role as a journalist and all the constant action it plunged me into—my life would not have been much different, regardless of who won or lost any one of the myriad clashes, causes, confrontations, election brawls, chases and other high-adrenaline situations that I found myself drawn to.
Ah … but this is a hasty judgement, and probably not true: I can think of at least a half-dozen public realities that I managed, for good or ill, to affect by my presence, participation or journalistic advocacy—(and in retrospect I’m about 98% happy with whatever ripples I caused in the great swamp of history)—and there were also those handful of moments when my life might have been drastically changed by what did not happen: like dying a violent death, a fate I seem to narrowly avoid about once every year, or going to prison, or becoming a junkie, or becoming an indentured servant to Jann Wenner, or running off to Bermuda with Eleanor McGovern, or becoming Sheriff of Pitkin County, the Governor of American Samoa or a speech-writer for Jimmy Carter….
Indeed … and on balance, my behavior as a person, writer, advocate, midnight-strategist, hatchet-man and serious gambler for at least the past ten years has been generally beneficial to myself, my friends, my wife and son, and most of the people I tend to side with, whenever the deal goes down…. Which is not a bad thing to look back on: and if I seem a bit cynical, at this point, or a trifle uncertain about The Meaning of It All, it is probably because of my secret conviction that a whole generation of journalists and journalism went over the hump with the Nixon/Watergate story, and that the odds against any of us ever hitting that kind of peak again are impossibly long. It was not just the Watergate story itself, but the fact that nobody who worked on the leading edge of journalism in the years between 1960 and 1975 could have asked or even hoped for a better or more dramatically perfect climax to what now seems like one long, violent and incredibly active story. When I proposed that book on “The Death of the American Dream” back in 1967 and then rushed off to cover the first act of Nixon’s political “comeback” in the ’68 New Hampshire primary, my instinct was better than any of us knew at the time—because the saga of Richard Nixon is The Death of the American Dream. He was our Gatsby, but the light on the end of his pier was black instead of green…. Whoever writes the true biography of Richard Nixon will write the definitive book on “The American Dream.”
We should keep that in mind, because that is the book I was just beginning to scent, 10 years ago. I was hearing the music, but I am not a musician and I couldn’t “put it to words,” and even when I found the right lyrics, in bits and pieces of almost everything I wrote in those years, it was not until I stood in the wet grass of the White House rose garden and watched Nixon stumble onto the helicopter that would carry him into exile that I heard the music again….
And I am still hearing it; but I am not quite ready to write the lyrics yet—and in the meantime I want to write a story that will leap and roll and crackle, a quick and brutal tale of life in a world without Nixon. What I need right now, I think, is a bit of a workout, something more along the lines of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas than the Saga of Horatio Nixon & the Death of the American Dream.
NO … don’t say it, Jim. Don’t even think it right now. We both know what kind of pain & suffering & preternatural concentration the Nixon book will require, and I simply can’t stand it right now. It’s too goddamn heavy, and it would take at least two & probably three years of extremely focused research, thinking & writing; because it is obviously the one book I’ve been instinctively gearing down to write for lo, these many years…. But that one will have to wait at least until we get Nixon’s own version of his ugly rise and fall, and in the meantime I think I’ve paid enough dues to justify another sort of busman’s vacation, on the order of F&L in Las Vegas, which is far and away my personal favorite of the three books I’ve written: It was also the most fun to write, the best and most economical piece of sustained “pure writing” I’ve ever done, and sooner or later it will prove to be the most financially successful of the three…. Which is fitting, because Vegas is a book that no other living writer could have written….
Indeed, and to hell with all that. What I’m saying now is that I think it’s about time for me to indulge, once again, that whole, high-powered strata of my writer’s energy that keeps bubbling up to the surface of all my journalism and confusing my standard-brand colleagues so badly that even the ones who consistently feel free to plagiarize my best concepts and perceptions seem almost personally offended by the style & stance of my “Gonzo journalism.”
Which rarely bothers me—but Rarely is different from Never, and every once in a while I think it’s healthy to clear the deck and lay a serious fireball on some of these bastards who lack either the grace or the integrity or both to understand that they can’t have it both ways. There are numerous lame and sterile ways to counter surface plagarizm (sp?), but the only sure and final cure is to write something so clearly and brutally original that only a fool would risk plagiarizing it … and that’s what I’d like to do now: If “Gonzo journalism” is essentially the “art” (or compulsion) of imposing a novelistic form on journalistic content then the next logical step in the “Gonzo process” would seem to be a 180 degree reversal of that process, by writing a “journalistic novel.”
Which is bullshit, of course, because on the high end is only one real difference between the two forms—and that is the rigidly vested interest in the maintenance of a polar (or strictly polarized) separation of “fiction” and “journalism” by at least two generations of New York–anchored writers who spent most of their working lives learning, practicing and finally insisting (on) the esthetic validity of that separation.
And what the hell? I suspect it’s genuinely important to them, so why not concede it? Ten years from now I might feel in a mood to force that kind of merger, but for now the formal separation works in my favor, because it gives me a straw man to beat on, and stir the buggers up. Just for the record, however—and one of these days I hope to find enough time to explain this notion properly—the only real difference between “journalism” and “fiction” in my own mind is legalistic: With our contemporary, standard-brand journalism as nothing more than a sloppy, lay-extension of the Rules of Evidence, rooted in the Adversary Relationship that governs our 20th century American trial procedure; and the best & highest kind of contemporary fiction or even High Novelistic Journalism with its roots in the thinking of those essentially Jeffersonian pragmatists often referred to by historians as “the great Stoic lawyers of ancient Rome….”
And, mother of babbling Jesus, how did I get into this? The only
point I wanted to make was that—by conceding what I consider a false distinction between journalism & fiction—I can jangle the rules even further by claiming to have made a 180 degree turn, quitting journalism and going back to The Novel, while in fact making no turn at all, and holding exactly the same course I began with Hell’s Angels. (… and, yes, 10 pages of this bullshit is enough, so let’s get to it … Selah.)
FROM U.S. SENATOR GEORGE MCGOVERN:
McGovern made plans to meet up with Thompson in Washington after the 1976 election.
November 20, 1976
Washington, D.C.
Dear Hunter:
I am dictating this note over the phone to Pat Donovan since I was unable to reach you on the phone following receipt of your letter of November ninth.
I am delighted to know you will be in Washington December 9–12. It so happens that I am a delegate to the United Nations this year, but I will be in Washington on Sunday, the twelfth. Could we have dinner that night? If so, let me know where you are staying and we will work out a time and a place to get together. Call me at home, or if you can’t reach me there, Pat Donovan at my office can work out arrangements with you.
Sunday night is not a good restaurant night in Washington, but I give you a couple of options—the Oak Room at the Mayflower or the Golden Palace on 7th Street—a good Chinese restaurant.
It’s going to be great to see you again.
All the best,
George McGovern
SHARK/HST … AUTHOR’S NOTE:
Thompson composed this “Author’s Note” as a draft introduction to his first anthology of “Gonzo Papers,” The Great Shark Hunt.
December, 1976
Woody Creek, CO
“ART IS LONG AND LIFE IS SHORT,
AND SUCCESS IS VERY FAR OFF.”
—J. Conrad
This book—if and when it finally goes to the printer—will stand like a pillar of fire as a monument to whatever strange fuel, madness or high and mysterious energy still cooks at the roots of this nation and keeps it still functioning in a world that no longer needs us.
I have done at least nine ugly things in my life that I hope I will never have to do again, and I have spent at least half my waking hours for the past twenty years trying to do things that were known to be doomed and impossible from the start; and most of them worked well enough, or at least I survived them and emerged with my body and brain sufficiently intact to insist that they all served a purpose of some kind … but if anybody had warned me, twenty years ago, that long before I was forty years old I would wake up in the late hours of some frozen afternoon 8000 feet high in the Rockies to the sound of telephones screeching all over my half-built log house, and then to hear the voice of some Random House editor in New York telling me I had less than forty-eight hours to write a coherent “introduction” to a book-length collection of “my work” that would be on the shelves of every library in America before the year was out, my instant reaction to such a warning would have been to bet so heavily against it that I would eagerly have sought out a notary public and signed over both balls and even my thumbs as collateral.
But that would not have been necessary or even possible, at that point—because twenty years ago I was locked up in the Jefferson County Jail in Louisville, Kentucky on a bogus “rape” charge and there was nobody in town who believed that even a three-dollar bet with both my balls and my thumbs as collateral was worth the risk on a twenty-year note. At the age of seventeen I was an infamous Juvenile Delinquent (sp?), Louisville’s answer to Billy the Kid,27 and not even my friends really thought I would live to see twenty.
Neither did I, for that matter—although if anybody had offered me even money on it, I would probably have taken the bet and felt comfortable, win or lose.
It was not a bad bet. The numbers were all on my side, at that age, and only a fool would have gambled like that with me anyway. My reputation as a mad-dog teen-age criminal made the prospect of winning such a bet with me almost as ugly as losing. By sundown on my twentieth birthday I would have either collected in full, or set fire to the houses of all those who owed me.
One of my last acts as a high school student, around midnight on the day of my final expulsion, was to steal a case of beer and then—with the help of two friends who had nothing better to do that evening—drive out to the posh suburb where we knew the city’s Superintendent of Schools lived, and throw all twenty-four unopened bottles through every window in the front of his house. …I can still hear the sounds of that hellish attack: Every ten seconds there would be the shrill crash of another window shattered, then a dull wet boom as the beer bottle exploded on the rugs or walls or furniture inside his house. God only knows what those poor bastards in the upstairs bedrooms were thinking as they rolled out of bed and crawled desperately around in the hallways on their hands and knees, groping in the darkness for a phone to call the police … (according to front-page reports in the next day’s Courier-Journal …).
But we knew we had plenty of time, so we set the case down on his lawn and aimed our shots carefully, putting them through the windows one at a time and laughing crazily at the sounds of carnage inside … and by the time the cops swarmed in, we were three miles away on the golf course in Cherokee Park, half-mad from all that adrenaline as we crouched in a sand-trap downhill from the Number One green and all three of us staggering, whooping drunk as we tried to calm down by finishing off another one of the six cases of beer we’d stolen earlier that night from The Depot …
Far below us, across Cherokee Lake and the steep-angled No. 5 fairway that still slants like a nasty green scar through the memories of those white-buck, haspel-cord years of my gin-soaked youth that centered so much on that park and that lake and that golf course where I spent most of my late afternoons during high school because it was the only place where I knew the probation officer couldn’t possibly find me … and on nights when the weather was warm or at least warm enough and the dew was so thick that the greens were too wet to sit on, unless you were naked, and even the sand in the bunkers was so damp that you could roll it up in your hands like summer snowballs … On nights like these and especially when we knew the police were looking for us, we would flee into Cherokee Park and drive out on the golf course, with lights off, to our hideout under the oak trees near the Number One green, where we could sit on the heavy stone benches and sip from a pint of Gilbey’s while we carefully constructed our alibis and stared down across the lake at the Toddle House parking lot and the back door of The Old Kentucky Tavern where we could usually recognize one or two cars that belonged to some of our friends like Sam Stallings or Bob Butler, dragging their underage girlfriends into the tavern for a Tom Collins or two in the dark and dirty “back room.”
Indeed, and so much for all that—except to stress that I have lived so much longer than I or anyone else expected me to, that I made no plans or provisions for this kind of awkward longevity and the realities that keep coming with it.
My own calculations, ever since the age of fifteen when the question of my life-expectancy first became a conscious and even a comfortable subject for speculation between me and my friends, were originally based on a personal calendar that ended with age 27. I can’t remember exactly how or why I fixed on that number, but I recall very clearly that—as a betting proposition—27 was as high as I was willing to go, at even odds.
Every year after that would have doubled the numbers. I would not have bet on my chances of living to collect any bets on my twenty-eighth birthday, for instance, at less than 2–1. Anybody willing to bet $100 that I would not be alive at the age of 28 would have had to pay me $200 if I was still breathing on my twenty-eighth birthday—or at least alive enough to be physically dangerous to welshers.
The price on age 29 was a minimal 4–1, and—even at twice those odds (8–1)—a bet against the likelihood of my ever reaching the natural age of 30 was one of history’s great gambling bargains. The real odds on my living 30 years on this earth
, I figured, were more like 20–1.
Well … Here we go again: Another one of these desperate, last-minute, half-sane sprints to beat another deadline … And, yes, it’s dawn again; this time in Woody Creek, with the sun looming up very suddenly from behind those mean white peaks along the Continental Divide … and now, at 6:33 on this cold Wednesday morning, flashing long, laser-like beams of a light the color of white gold on the high ridge of bright snowfields across the valley … And yes, I have just paid another installment on my news-junkie’s dues by watching my old friend Hughes Rudd do his gig once again with the CBS Morning News….
But I found myself unable, this time, to give the morning news my full attention: There were a lot of things happening, and I recall watching part of a long and seemingly intense interview between [CBS correspondent] Bruce Morton and somebody heavy from the White House or Foggy Bottom or some other outpost of access in Jimmy Carter’s world. …I forget who it was, or what Bruce and Hughes were asking him about, but I recall very clearly that nothing in the conversation had any effect on me at all. I felt no anger, no elation, no excitement of any kind…. It was like watching a Cyrus Vance28 press conference—and for all I know, it might have been Vance they were interviewing, a sort of well-bred telephone pole in the first throes of menopause…. Which is not all bad, because if he handles it right he is well on his way to the kind of perpetual “senior statesman” role now occupied by such elegant fossils as Clark Clifford and Averell Harriman,29 whose long years of “service” to the Democratic Party and The Nation—in that order—have gained them a rare and very special kind of stature that is honored mainly in the breach, but acknowledged just often enough to maintain their credibility on that level of national politics and international diplomacy that functions in the high-powered, soft-spoken, after-dark arena of Washington’s social circuit: The dining rooms of Georgetown, the lawn parties at estates across the river in woodsy McLean, and the private penthouse suites of high-rolling foreign ambassadors along Embassy Row.