By Hunter S. Thompson
Current
The book began as a 250-word caption for Sports Illustrated. I was down in LA, working on a very tense and depressing investigation of the allegedly accidental killing of a journalist named Ruben Salazar by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept—and after a week or so on the story I was a ball of nerves & sleepless paranoia (figuring that I might be next)…and I needed some excuse to get away from the angry vortex of that story & try to make sense of it without people shaking butcher knives in my face all the time.
My main contact on that story was the infamous Chicano lawyer Oscar Acosta—an old friend, who was under bad pressure at the time, from his super-militant constituents, for even talking to a gringo/gabacho journalist. The pressure was so heavy, in fact, that I found it impossible to talk to Oscar alone. We were always in the midst of a crowd of heavy streetfighters who didn’t mind letting me know that they wouldn’t need much of an excuse to chop me into hamburger.
This is no way to work on a very volatile & very complex story. So one afternoon I got Oscar in my rented car and drove him over to the Beverly Hills Hotel—away from his bodyguards, etc.—and told him I was getting a bit wiggy from the pressure; it was like being on stage all the time, or maybe in the midst of a prison riot. He agreed, but the nature of his position as “leader of the militants” made it impossible for him to be openly friendly with a gabacho.
I understood this…and just about then, I remembered that another old friend, now working for Sports Illustrated, had asked me if I felt like going out to Vegas for the weekend, at their expense, and writing a few words about a motorcycle race. This seemed like a good excuse to get out of LA for a few days, and if I took Oscar along it would also give us time to talk and sort out the evil realities of the Salazar/Murder story.
So I called Sports Illustrated—from the patio of the Polo Lounge—and said I was ready to do the “Vegas thing.” They agreed…and from here on in there is no point in running down details, because they’re all in the book.
More or less…and this qualifier is the essence of what, for no particular reason, I’ve decided to call Gonzo Journalism. It is a style of “reporting” based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism—and the best journalists have always known this.
Which is not to say that Fiction is necessarily “more true” than Journalism—or vice versa—but that both “fiction” and “journalism” are artificial categories; and that both forms, at their best, are only two different means to the same end. This is getting pretty heavy…so I should cut back and explain, at this point, that Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas is a failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism. My idea was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication—without editing. That way, I felt, the eye & mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera. The writing would be selective & necessarily interpretive—but once the image was written, the words would be final; in the same way that a Cartier-Bresson photograph is always (he says) the full-frame negative. No alterations in the darkroom, no cutting or cropping, no spotting…no editing.
But this a hard thing to do, and in the end I found myself imposing an essentially fictional framework on what began as a piece of straight/crazy journalism. True Gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he’s writing it—or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.
The American print media are not ready for this kind of thing, yet. Rolling Stone was probably the only magazine in America where I could get the Vegas book published. I sent Sports Illustrated 2500 words—instead of the 250 they asked for—and my manuscript was aggressively rejected. They refused to even pay my minimum expenses…
But to hell with all that. I seem to be drifting away from the point—that Fear & Loathing is not what I thought it would be. I began writing it during a week of hard typewriter nights in a room at the Ramada Inn—in a place called Arcadia, California—up the road from Pasadena & right across the street from the Santa Anita racetrack. I was there during the first week of the Spring Racing—and the rooms all around me were jammed with people I couldn’t quite believe.
Heavy track buffs, horse trainers, ranch owners, jockeys & their women…I was lost in that swarm, sleeping most of each day and writing all night on the Salazar article. But each night, around dawn, I would knock off the Salazar work and spend an hour or so, cooling out, by letting my head unwind and my fingers run wild on the big black Selectric…jotting down notes about the weird trip to Vegas. It had worked out nicely, in terms of the Salazar piece—plenty of hard straight talk about who was lying and who wasn’t, and Oscar had finally relaxed enough to talk me straight. Flashing across the desert at 110 in a big red convertible with the top down, there is not much danger of being bugged or overheard.
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