Hunter S. Thompson would have been 75 today. In celebration of the legendary Gonzo journalist’s birthday, here’s a look back at our feature with Thompson that ran in the April-May 2003 issue of Relix.

Hunter S. Thompson’s eyes lit up when he saw the fireworks. “Hot damn, you’ve got Action!” he said, fondling the tightly packing bomb, running his fingers down its elegant spine-fuse and around its bulbous body. “This is real good shit. Real good.” Owing to the agreeable weather and it being the Chinese New Year and all, I’d suggested that we hop a cab over to Central Park and set off some fireworks.

Thompson pondered this and placed the firework on the car, amidst the slowly accumulating clutter between drink tumblers: two pairs of eyeglasses (one reading, one tinted), cigarettes (one half-smoked and burning, one mostly pull pack of Dunhill’s), an ugly brown cigarette holder (retrieved for him by his assistant, Anita, after he let forth a high-pitched squeal), a round plastic receptacle containing a white powder (ingested orally through a short sipping straw), several lighters (though he later pilfered my associate’s), and a copy of his new book, a memoir titled Kingdom of Fear (presented to Kevin, the bartender at Elaine’s, a New York City hangout for cops, writers and unrepentant smokers).

“You guys are gonna set that off outside, right?” Kevin asked nervously, remembering the time Thompson gargled Bacardi fireballs at the bar, nearly setting the place ablaze. He amiably refilled our glasses anyway, apparently without our noticing. Likewise, Thompson laid out his goods with a sleight of hand. One moment, we were sitting at the bar with just our drinks, the next moment, Thompson had a small arsenal of employable props. Each could be dissected as some key fragment of Thompson’s public persona, the character he carved for himself in half-mad, cocksure journalistic novels and autobiographical dispatches from his self-assigned beat, “the Death of the American Dream.”

In Hell’s Angels (1967), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973), The Great Shark Hunt (1979), and countless articles and straight acidic screeds, Thompson laid into American culture with broad fangs and endless bravado. It was this combination the turned him into a legendary figure forever associated with the fringe – drugs, guns, and nearly vengeful hippiedom – and caricatured to Thompson’s eternal displeasure, as Uncle Duke in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury.

At 65, Thompson is still raffish. His cartoony bow-legged walk is tempered slightly by the use of a hard wooden cane – though, lest anyone read it as a sign of deterioration, Thompson also used the cane to measure the fear instincts of nearby civilians by thwacking it soundly against the side of the bar.

Just over the frontal lobe of his brain, at the center of his white buttoned brim fishing cap, was a small cream-colored pin with the closest thing Thompson has to a logo: a sharp image of a cross formed by the intersection of a word in black text and a six-fingered fist stemming down to a dagger-like point and clenching an asterisk-shaped peyote button. The word, which crosses just below the palm, is “Gonzo.”

It is rare for a writer and a single word to be so conjoined. Attributed to him in the Oxford English Dictionary, it describes both an attitude and a form of reportage he championed. Based on William Faulkner’s notion that the best fiction is more accurate than any fact, Gonzo provided the theoretical gas to spark Thompson’s blowtorch prose. As a literary style, it had two main tenets: total subjectivity and a first draft/best draft approach that jibed perfectly with the post-Beatnik literary world of the late 1960s.

Thompson threw himself into his stories recklessly, riding with Hell’s Angels, getting drunk with Kentucky Colonels at the Derby in his native Louisville, and talking football with Satan himself, Richard Milhous Nixon. Most famously, he (with friend and Chicano activist Oscar Acosta) set out on a multi-day drug rampage in Las Vegas. It was a chaotic dear experiment, as he explained to his editor at the time, where he and Acosta gave “dollar bills to ‘boys’ for quick unctuous service” and went “roaring into the Circus-Circus in a huge Coupe de Ville [in order to] know the insanity of watching people jump and run and salute and all that crap.”

Active Citizenship-Personalizing Politics
Thompson describes himself as a hillbilly. And, like a lot of things, he means this far more literally than one might first suspect. He rarely leaves the Colorado highlands. When he does – such as for a whirlwind promotional tour of book signings, television appearances and interviews that landed him in New York following the publication of Kingdom of Fear – he seems incredibly ill at ease. When his attention drifted, it wasn’t hard to imagine his mind wandering back to the quiet dark of the hills.

Reductively, Thompson has always been the old man from the mountains who stumbles out of the underbrush every few years to wreak havoc and pass judgment, before growing exasperated and cantankerously trundling back to the hills to be with his guns and books and peacocks. The birds stalk the night as Owl Farm, Thompson’s home of 40 years, squawking creepily as they navigate between twisted pieces of metallic sculpture and the wreckage of whatever Thompson’s been using for targets lately.

Owl Farm is often referred to as a “fortified compound” , and there seems some kernel of truth to that. Memorabilia of all kinds line the walls, remnants of Thompson’s long career. There are weapons and drugs, but most of them are books. Thompson is a man of letters, and dishes out references with aplomb: H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain, Bob Dylan and the Book of Revelations, enlightened men and porn moguls, learned philosophers and speed freaks – a vast panoply of the wizened and weird.

Amidst the clutter are also Thompson’s extensive archives – carbon copies of everything he has written, including several thousand letters – haphazardly organized by dozens of assistants over the years, which only necessitates new assistants to untangle the filing systems of previous ones. A third volume of his collected letters is currently being prepared, and he is playing an active role in a film adaptation of The Rum Diary, a novel he wrote in the late 1950s. Set to again star Johnny Depp and Benecio Del Toro, along with Val Kilmer and others, the movie will go into production sometime next year.

Inside, Thompson works on his beloved typewriters, never upgrading to a computer, despite a weekly column on ESPN’s website. His brain works only as fast as he can type on a vintage Selectric. In conversation, he speaks in tight bursts, quickly stopping and starting, as if allowing his hands time to type. “I’veneverunderstood. Whatamemoir. Reallyis.” When he stumbles, which is frequent, the impression is that he’s stuck on a word. The constant derailments can be explained, perhaps, as lingual crossroads: how to write the story. When presented with an object of desire or potential Action he barrels ahead, his body language changing and thoughts focusing.

“I leave [Colorado] once every two months,” Thompson said. “In the past six months, I’ve been to Hawaii and LA. It’s getting harder and harder because of the planes. I fly first class, with all the advantages I can get, but – goddamn – it’s just getting more and more horrible. That’s intentional, I believe. That’s part of the overall plan to dumb the population down. A frightened population is obedient. They’re confused. They’re afraid. A fearful population is going to be easier, more malleable, more complaint. I wasn’t personally hassled [on the way to New York], but the breakdown of the system hassles everybody.”
“Politics is the art of controlling your environment,” Thompson is fond of saying. For Thompson, politics is the base level at which humans communicate and it deeply bothers him when people make no attempt to engage.
“If you don’t do it – if you don’t participate in your life – someone else will. You’re either going to be aware of what’s happening around you, or you’re going to be a slave to it.” For his part, Thompson ran for sheriff of Aspen in 1970, waging a ridiculous (and widely documented) campaign on the Freak Power ticket, whose promises included renaming Aspen “Fat City” (to discourage tourism) and very nearly won. More recently, he has played an active role in the Fourth Amendment Foundation, founded in 1990 after he was acquitted in a privacy issues case to protect citizens from unlawful searches of their homes.

Thompson is an avowed enemy of Timothy Leary’s “turn on, tune in, drop out” mantra. “I believed that the thing to do with acid was to eat it and go out and get involved in the public life.” He built steam. “Leary, that son-of-a-bitch, that fraud… I think he was the most horrible person to come out of all the ‘60s. He advocated his way, which was the Guru way. You had to have a guide, and had to do things in a certain way, be in a room with certain lights, and have a certain high priest leading you. And that would be him, of course. I denounced Leary right from the beginning, even when I didn’t know that he was a working, hired informant for the FBI.”

When Thompson offers an unsympathetic account of the ‘60s, he’s not being a revisionist. He said the same thing at the time, as he fermented in the same San Franciscan ooze as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. He bemoans the lack of a contemporary counterculture. “Jerry Garcia was a friend,” he said. “He and I used to argue. He was totally against politics. He had nothing but contempt for my involvement, my running for Sheriff. But I believe that until you personalize politics, you’re not gonna get anywhere. This war is not some distant thing. If every Deadhead voted, the country would be a different place.”

Thompson speaks of politics like an old General ready to fetch his tank in an age of personal rocketships. He calls music his “fuel.” Favorite albums like Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home and Los Lobos’ Kiko are valuable not because they are pleasurable escapes, but because they push him on.

Several times throughout Kingdom of Fear there appears a quote, attributed alternately to Robert Kennedy, an 18th century British political theorist named Edward Burke, and Thompson himself: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” When Thompson recited the dictum in the bar, his voice rose, as if looking for other patrons to join him in a moment of old-time solidarity.

Men of Action are needed. Taken as such, Gonzo is not too far removed from the bliss of the Beats, the Grateful Dead, or even Walt Whitman: being able to fully appreciate the capital-M Moment. Where Thompson splits with them, though, is his willingness to hone in on both ugliness and its consequences.

“My idea [for Vegas was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication – without editing,” he proclaimed, describing undiluted Gonzo. Thompson has inspired more bad journalism than perhaps any other American writer. “’All you have to do is drink a little whiskey, smoke a joint, eat some acid, and you too can write like this! ’” Thompson groused. “That’s as stupid as it sounds.”

At his best, a Gonzo journalist works not unlike an improvising musician. Just as a soloist must be able to spontaneously formulate coherent music from a knowledge of theory, form and historical vocabulary, a Gonzo journalist should be able to parse a story in real-time. It is a way of experiencing things with open antennae, fully aware of the mechanisms grinding under a scene’s surface, both subjectively and objectively.

And, sure, the drugs help, too. Gonzo is a primal manifestation of what might be deemed “the authentic American Dream.” In recent years, the phrase, “the pursuit of happiness” has come to mean, basically, the right to be left the fuck alone. Rather, as historian Gary Wills has posited, Thomas Jefferson meant something more classical. Being a good American didn’t mean engaging in self-absorbed quests for money. It meant being an active citizen, which would inevitably lead to a rich happiness. The simplest step one can take is to become aware of what’s going on around him.

In other words: Shit, if you’re gonna light off fireworks in the middle of a major metropolitan area, you should be damn sure of what the law is, the history of the flying dirt you turn up, and who you might piss off. “What kind of ordinances do you have around here?” Thompson asked, nearly as soon as he saw the fireworks. “What kind of permits do you have?”

“Do we have a sunroof?” Thompson barked at the limo driver, who had parked in front of the bar. “I have some rockets that you can shoot out of cars,” he explained. He turned a cardboard mortar over and paused. “This is not one of them. The ones I’ve got are Marine rockets. They really light things up – 40 miles for 40 seconds with 40,000 candlepower. They really hang up there.”

The sunroof whirred open quietly, air pouring in. Thompson looked up, then out the windows at the passing Upper East Side traffic. “I’d just as soon do it right here,” he announced, and took another hit off the bowl. “I’m a law abiding citizen.” A loose theme of Kingdom of Fear is Thompson’s life-long relationship with the Law, beginning with a childhood incident. “To live outside the law, you must be honest,” he writes, quoting Dylan.

“I don’t think it’s the right and duty of Americans to carry a gun,” he said. "We know that the more guns that are left around, the more trouble you’re gonna have. I live out in the wilderness, far out in the wilderness. They’re tools. I’m not a murderer. I don’t go around and shoot people. It’s stupid to shoot people. It’s not beneficial. Or necessary.
“Where I stand leads to an elitist point of view, and not entirely democratic. My gut feeling is that I should have firearms, and not everybody else should. You can see the elitism in that. But it’s true. I have a proven record of 40 years.”

Since his pivotal political coverage in the ‘70s, Thompson’s output has been notoriously erratic, publishing sporadically in Rolling Stone, Playboy, and numerous sports magazines. For a time in the 1980s, he penned a media criticism column for the San Francisco Examiner. During this time, Thompson mutated into an icon, more often invoked as a character reference than an actual writer.

Thompson’s writing has suffered in recent years, often coming off as unfocused and paranoid; or, more often, as simply a mix-n-match of stock invective – swine, twisted, fear, bastards, atavistic, Nazi – interspersed with great Ideas and proclamations that employ Capital Letters and imply some insane Mix of drug Frenzy and early Protestant political writings.

When applied well, Thompson’s use of capital letters plugs his writing into much older stories. When he writes of firemen fighting Fire, they aren’t simply extinguishing a blaze, they are engaging in a battle with a Biblical plague. Thompson frames the Bush regime similarly. “It’s a simple Plot,” he says, capital letters evident by the tone of his voice. “There are old-time Procedures: take over the government and loot the Treasury.”

To Thompson, the Bush regime is pure Fire, one that he’ll Fight from his new platform at Vanity Fair, where he says he’ll soon begin publishing (while according to Thompson, he continues his effort to get his name removed from the Rolling Stone masthead). Despite a generally chilly reception (the New York Times called it a “haphazard journalistic yard-sale” ), Kingdom of Fear was an instant hit, selling out its first printing and quickly rising onto the Times ’ own best-seller list. Simply, Thompson is still an agitator with a clarion message, which is why he remains relevant, as a character, a public figure and a writer.

And he’s managed to do it without tempering his message. “I piss down the throat of those Nazis,” he writes of the Bush administration, and means it. Lately, he’s been rereading William Shirer’s classic study, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. “I would think it would be pretty difficult to understand what’s going on now in terms of history without reading this. You’ll see the parallels between Nazi Germany and this country. It’s scary.”

While Kingdom of Fear isn’t exactly a return to form, Thompson is still capable of a fantastic dissent. “It was the death of fun, unreeling right in front of us,” he writes of September 11th’s aftermath “unraveling, withering, collapsing, draining away in the darkness like a handful of stolen mercury. Yep, the silver stuff goes suddenly, leaving only a glaze of poison on the skin.”

Andre Breton called surrealism a “new vice.” “There is every reason to believe that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do,” he wrote, and the same might be said of Gonzo. It is said that after Bill Murray portrayed Thompson in 1980’s Where the Buffalo Roam (an amusing, though deeply flawed, biopic), he began to take on Thompson’s personal characteristics, donning dark glasses, smoking cigarettes through a filter, and becoming increasingly volatile. Similar rumors circulated about Johnny Depp after his appearance in Terry Gilliam’s 1998 adaptation of Vegas.

Rallying the troops in bars, Thompson knows full well that his actions will be duly reported in the gossip pages. “Those fuckers didn’t even mention I had a new book!” he kvetched about coverage of his colorful appearance at an Aspen peace rally. Out and about, Thompson is a self-conscious public figure and, thus, a performer.

Between the salad and the main entrée
One of the tasks of Thompson’s assistants is to transcribe tapes. Like his old friend Nixon, he records a lot – phone calls, conversations, and the like. He is no doubt conscious of the permanent record. There were two tape machines running at the bar. One was strapped to Thompson, the other to me. Mysteriously, Thompson’s cut off as soon as we stepped outside, and returned exactly when we reentered the bar. “I wanna eat some of that salad before we light this off,” Thompson can be heard saying. “Let’s go back inside, we can do it between the salad and the main entrée.”

As Thompson’s tape cuts back in, he is telling his Handlers that he’s extremely stoned. At other points, Thompson wanders off to consult with members of his entourage about whether or not to contact bookies, or ask where his hash is. Exactly spliced, the recording seems an invitation to eavesdrop on Thompson’s other conversations. Indeed, the Handlers play an important role in Thompson’s current mythology. He uses them as a public prop just as well as any cane, cigarette holder, or tin that may be filled with common sugar.

Following his introduction on Late Night with Conan O’Brien several days later, Thompson appeared from behind the curtain, beverage in hand, and began to walk in the wrong direction. Several men appeared, took Thompson’s drink, and gave him a nudge towards O’Brien, only to have him walk behind the set’s furniture, causing further chaos. It is a common ploy for Thompson as tapes of appearances with David Letterman often feature him entering the stage several seconds after his cue. On one hand, it might be simple intoxication.

On the other hand, it might be read as a conscious attempt to throw things off – which, in a way, seems to be exactly the goal of Thompson’s professional drug use: to produce Action. “I’m not a drug abuser,” he insisted. “I’m a drug user. I’ve always said that drugs are no excuse. Being drunk is no excuse. If that’s how you’re gonna operate in the world, don’t try to blame it on some weird shit.”

And why not? Drugs are fun. Fireworks are fun. They can be beautiful, especially in such an ugly, paranoid climate. What else besides strange wonder could one feel if he saw, for no instantly discernable reason, a crystally spark shower with no other witnesses to verify it?

After the explosion, there will be silence, and in that silence there exists the possibility for a better world where anything can happen, because something just did happen.

Action points towards Rest. There are fast cars in Thompson’s stories, very fast, but they almost always take Thompson to a deserted beach for a moonlit swim or someplace else where he can enjoy the afterglow of Speed and Chaos. The most common setting for Thompson’s work is late at night, usually in a hotel room, the rest of the world at slumber, where he can reflect thoughtfully. Writing itself becomes a sublime act.

Though he’d deny it to the end ( “We won’t get anywhere if we talk about Utopia!” he snapped, as if someone might overhear), Thompson reveals the heart of a dreamer. Moments are made transcendental not because he has a sense of what is wrong and can articulate it (though he does), but because he has a sense of what is undoubtedly perfect and magical. “There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning,” he writes in Vegas.

Thompson reflected on the reputation that has acted as an open invitation for people to continuously show up in his life with weed and explosives and sounded more than a little bit weary, though he glared longingly at the sunroof as he said it.

“It gets boring, every time that cartoon runs, that Doonesbury thing. It’s a little bit of fun, maybe, to be taken as a lunatic. It colors people’s perceptions. If you call the President a ‘shit-eating dog’ and then you say he should ‘get the fuck out of Iraq’, it may give the ‘get the fuck out of Iraq’ a crazy tinge. ‘Oh, the messenger is a little stoned, so whatever it is, it can’t be true!’” Thompson looked at the sunroof once more and heaved himself out of the limo.

If Action points to Rest, the Rest – such as, say, sitting in a bar, walking outside to a limousine, then walking back inside the bar – surely points right back at Action, a great circle. Each needs the other, and Thompson needs Rest, because he needs to write. So he creates Action. It’s passive-aggressive, really.

Inside, Thompson reconvened with the Handlers. “Anita AnitaAnitaAnitaAnita!” he called, voice rising in pitch. “Where’s my hammer?” Anita retrieved an exaggerated plastic hammer that, when force was applied, reproduced a crash of shattering glass via a cheap, distorting sound chip. Thompson hit me over the head.

After the salad, before the main entrée could even be discussed, Thompson was swept off by the Handlers to deal with a phone call. I was left with a bag of fireworks and a head full of ways to use them.