Going, Going, Gonzo

IT WAS, as such, a quintessentially gonzo situation. Hunter Thompson and his "technical adviser" (drug conduit) Yail Bloor, while escaping the angry Yucatan town of Cozumel and unpaid bills for hotel rooms, drugs and cars, have to get rid of "two hits of MDA, six tabs of acid, about a gram and a half of raw cocaine, four reds and a random handful of speed" before their Aeromexico flight touches down in Texas. The Lone Star State, it seems, has a reputation for being unfriendly to people who try to carry massive amounts of hallucinogens through customs.

He hunkered down in his seat, saying nothing. Then he stared across at me. "What are you saying? That we should just throw all this shit away?"

I thought for a moment. "No. I think we should eat it."

"What?"

"Yeah, why not? They can't bust you for what's already dissolved in your belly--no matter how weird you're acting."

"Jesus Christ!" he muttered. "We'll go stark raving nuts if we eat all this shit!"

I shrugged. "Keep in mind where we'll be when we hit Customs," I said. "San Antonio, Texas. Are you ready to get busted in Texas?" He stared down at his fingernails.

"Remember Tim Leary?" I said. "Ten years for three ounces of grass in his daughter's panties..."

He nodded. "Jesus...Texas! I'd forgotten about that."

Not surprisingly, the two manage to survive their adventure with only a sustained high. This episode, typical of the acknowledged "Prince of Gonzo," can be found in the title piece of his first book in six years, The Great Shark Hunt.

Those who do not look kindly on Thompson's scream-of-consciousness writing style consider his stuff to be no more than "pseudo-literary exhibitionism," the product of a burned-out mind and of little significance to anyone but academics doing studies on the evil effects of narcotics. William F. Buckley Jr., writing in this week's New York Times Book Review, predictably attributes Thompson's work to "a very nearly unrelieved distemper," and comments that he "elicits the same kind of admiration one would feel for a streaker at Queen Victoria's funeral."

Such high-toned criticism ignores the value of an observer (and often participant) like Thompson, who, instead of couching his accounts in detached and restrained tones and carefully excising any references to personal experiences, writes spontaneously and subjectively, with a minimum of pretense, refinement and distillation.

Gonzo journalism takes the oxymoron "objective journalism" and laughs in its face. When Thompson "covers" an event, he writes through his own eyes and experiences, because it is the best--if not the only--way to convey what he has seen.

A newspaper article is not reality; it is the reporter's closest acceptable approximation of it. The difference between "gonzo" and "objective" journalism is that while AP/UPI/New York Times/Harvard Crimson news articles usually walk a treacherous tightrope between what the reporter actually believes has happened and the accepted rules of "fairness and balance" and attribution for everything, the gonzo piece just spews observations and conclusions that would have no place in formal, tightly constructed "factual journalism."

THOMPSON'S NEWEST BOOK, over 600 pages, includes 49 articles that span his career from a relatively straight South American reporter for the National Observer in the early 60's through the protogonzoid transition stage of the late 60's to Rolling Stone national affairs correspondent in the disgustingly un-freaked-out 70's, where Thompson's semi-paranoid, disoriented, "vulgar," terminal brilliance reminds the stultified that there is an unpleasant side of life, whether they like it or not.

Even during his tenure as an "objective" reporter--and a pretty competent one--one could see the gonzo straining to get out. In a 1967 New York Times Magazine article on the drug scene, he writes

...A journalist dealing with heads is caught in a strange dilemma. The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without firsthand experience is a fool and a fraud.

Yet to write from experience is an admission of felonious guilt...So, despite the fact that the whole journalism industry is full of unregenerate heads it is not very likely that the frank, documented truth about the psychedelic underworld, for good or ill, will be illuminated at any time soon in the public prints.

In August 1968, Thompson attended the Democratic National Convention and its concurrent "police riot." He never published an account of what happened to him there, but occasionally refers to it in darkly veiled hints about viciousness at the corner of Michigan and Balboa. The sixties died there--or were killed--Thompson has written, and it was a turning point in his writing as well. After a couple of transitional pieces, including a bitter account of Nixon's first inauguration, he plunged full-fledged into gonzo with "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Deparaved," a hilarious and brutal tale with Thompson in the starring role, English illustrator Ralph Steadman as side-kick, and the liquor-filled aristocracy of Churchill Downs as the venal side of America.

But Thompson is at his best when he's writing about politics, not everyday debauchery. Alongside his rise to gonzo superstardom was the rise and fall of Richard Nixon. Thompson's visceral loathing for Nixon comes through repeatedly, from '68 to '72 to Watergate. They are, as both would gladly admit, opposites. Yet, when it's all over, and Nixon is leaving Washington, even Thompson regrets it a bit; the excitement and intensity of the chase is over.

"The main reaction to Richard Nixon's passing, writes Thompson, "--especially among those journalists who had been on the Deathwatch for two years--was a wild and wordless orgasm of long-awaited relief that tailed off almost instantly to a dull post-coital sort of depression that still endures." Since that August day five years ago, Thompson, like the country, has been drifting, waiting for a new target.

BUT EVEN AS HE drifts, Thompson's perspective is valuable. Although a hundred other publications may cover an event, Thompson's "goddamn gibberish" will give it a flavor and texture that wouldn't otherwise get into print. Reading Thompson and no one else won't give readers a "full understanding" of what goes on during a Presidential election, a Super Bowl or a Chicano uprising in L.A. But neither will the calculated "uni-tone" of Time magazine or the caution--sometimes necessary but not always illuminating--of "objective" journalism. The Great Shark Hunt ensures that the "bad craziness" that a lot of people would like to forget will be preserved, and not die on the trash heaps of Rolling Stone's disintegrating bound volumes.