Night of the Hunter (S. Thompson)
“You remind me a bit of Hunter S. Thompson,” said Dr. K. “You ever read him?”
I wasn’t really in a position to answer. Dr. K’s a chiropractor, and at that moment I was bracing myself for that adjustment he does, the one where it feels like he’s gently yanking out all the bones in my neck.
I was flattered, though I suspected his reference was more to our shared hairstyles, or lack thereof, than any similarities in our writing. I said as much.
“No, no,” he assured me. “I don’t know why, but I’m getting the hit you should revisit him.” Dr. K’s suggestions are usually worth following up on. And so I headed down to the library, picked up Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, and fell through a portal back in time to an earlier version of myself.
I loved Thompson at first read (circa 1986), but I’d largely forgotten about him since. As a teenager who was, shall we say, highly engaged with the challenge of procuring and consuming psychedelics, the first two Fear and Loathing books were catnip to me. Thompson was a born daredevil and button-pusher. He went where I wouldn’t (or couldn’t), documenting various dissociative states and brushes with danger with bracing, understated humor. Whether embarking on extended drug trips or casually discharging firearms, Thompson always seemed more concerned with blastoff than with touchdown. Unlike me, he never seemed overly concerned with whether or not he’d remembered to pack a parachute.
Hell’s Angels is Thompson’s first book, written a few years before his “legend” had solidified. His writing here is as clean and incisive as it will ever be, and the subject matter—the lawless motorcycle clan of outsiders, margin-walkers, and straight-up freaks—gives him a pry bar into his central concern: the emptiness and inherent hypocrisy of mainstream society. In Thompson’s view the book’s two poles, the Angels and the police, are more alike than either will admit. They just wear different outfits.
Thompson in his natural habitat
Revisiting Thompson’s electric prose was a gift, a time capsule taking me back to an earlier, more nebulous version of myself. As a teenager I was obsessed with the 1960s, the decade of expansion and upheaval I’d missed by the merest of silvers (I was born in 1971). Viewed through the grimy windows of city buses, early ‘80s Washington, D.C. felt terminally bleak. But reading Hunter S. Thompson with The Byrds, The Seeds, and a thousand snotty pre-punkers filtering through the headphones of my Walkman I could dream myself into a far more interesting place. Eventually I’d find it, and it was Hunter S. Thompson—present at Ground Zero of the first psychedelic Renaissance—who helped point the way. But as his experience demonstrated, psychedelics aren’t a guarantee of greater consciousness, or even common decency. I’ll get to that in a moment.
As a teenager, I didn’t want just any old version of the ‘60s. Hippie culture left me cold; I wanted vividness, sharpness, clarity. This was in no way at odds with the dissolution promised by high doses of hallucinogens. As anyone who’s tried it knows, LSD has a harsh chemical edge, in moments making it seem the world has a vivid grid of electricity superimposed over it. Thompson, comparing the drug with riding a motorcycle at high speed, called it “the place of definition.” There was nothing the least bit ambiguous or wishy-washy about LSD. It opened a little breathing room between me and the screen jammed close to my face. I belonged here; I could move in this place.
Still, reading Thompson, I couldn’t escape the nagging suspicion that everything had already happened. His account of a 1965 party at Ken Kesey’s compound in La Honda fairly crackles with electricity. The guests comprise an A-list of psychonauts: The Merry Pranksters, a cohort of Hell’s Angels, Allen Ginsburg, the pre-Ram Dass “LSD guru” Richard Alpert. Outside are the police: A large contingent have massed at the gate to the property across a small wooden bridge. Fortunately for Kesey, they lack a search warrant. As their emergency lights flash out over the revelers, a wasted Neal Cassady—the real-life model for On the Road’s Dean Moriarty—sallies out to confront them:
“He was swaying and yelling in the bright glare of a light from the porch, holding a beer bottle in one hand and shaking his fist at the objects of his scorn: ‘You sneaky motherfuckers! What the fuck’s wrong with you? Come on over here and see what you get…goddamn your shit-filled souls anyway!’ Then he would laugh and wave his beer around. ‘Don’t fuck with me, you sons of shitlovers. Come on over. You’ll get every fucking thing you deserve’.”
Sons of shitlovers? Cassady, it should be mentioned, is also nude.
But not everything’s groovy. The party was more or less the Angels’ (and Thompson’s) introduction to LSD, and it wasn’t necessarily a great match:
“Dropping acid with the Angels was an adventure; they were too ignorant to know what to expect, and too wild to care. They just swallowed the stuff and hung on...which is probably just as dangerous as the experts say, but a far, far nuttier trip than sitting in some sterile chamber with a condescending guide and a handful of nervous, would-be hipsters.”
The scene is already disintegrating, or revealing its inherent emptiness. Thompson doesn’t flinch when he describes what happens next (though I infer some details are altered, I suspect at an editor’s insistence). Observing a cohort of Angels marching to an outbuilding, Thompson decides to investigate. What he finds inside could loosely be described as “barely consensual group sex.” In actuality, it sounds a lot closer to gang rape. Disgusted and demoralized, Thompson swallows his first-ever LSD capsule and leaves to wander the woods instead. Yikes.
The Merry Pranksters’ 1939 International Harvester school bus, “Further”
It’s a bit much, even for me, to try and distill the essence of the 1960s into a single party attended by a bunch of tripping white people. Still, there’s something prescient about Thompson’s account. In 1965, a fierce debate raged in the psychedelics movement as its gatekeepers—therapists and academics—argued whether or not they should release Prometheus’ stolen fire to the masses. Eventually, of course, the masses decided they deserved enlightenment, or something like it, as much as anyone else did. But as the episode at Kesey’s party demonstrates, psychedelics then as now are hardly a guarantee of higher consciousness or good judgement. Still, it’s hard not to wonder what a large cohort of turned-on citizens could have achieved, or averted, in the half-century since then. It’s telling that we find ourselves in roughly the same place today, standing on the verge of yet another psychedelic renaissance. Only now, of course, capitalism has intervened. As of this writing, the legal psychedelics market is expected to exceed $10 billion by 2027.
After the publication of Hell’s Angels, Thompson the writer began to blur with Thompson the legend. He’d later describe 1966 as a high-water mark, the beginning of the end of the sense of limitless possibility. His onetime associate Roberto Loiederman shares a pithy description of a typical San Francisco night with Thompson from that time. Any reader of Thompson’s will recognize the central elements: LSD, vandalism, and gunplay around Thompson’s infant son. As Loiederman argues, in ignoring the real-world consequences of wanton drug use, elitism, and casual violence, Thompson sold both his readers and himself short.
Much as I admire Thompson, it’s hard not to agree. Despite his copious experience with hallucinogens, it’s telling that he never really bothers to chronicle his internal state. Timothy Denevi, whose Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson's Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism offers a probing and insightful reframing of Thompson’s legacy, wrote of Thompson’s LSD experience at Kesey’s party:
“He’d finally gone to the bottom of the well, the place he feared most, and to his enduring astonishment he’d found these depths empty.”
Thompson never seems to have looked back. As the ‘70s ground on, Thompson became a celebrated writer but an increasingly unreliable journalist. Cocaine and alcohol replaced LSD and mescaline. In moments of clarity he could touch on the dissonance of the character he and others—notably cartoonist Garry Trudeau—had created of himself:
"I'm never sure which one people expect me to be. Very often, they conflict…I’m leading a normal life and right alongside me there is this myth, and it is growing and mushrooming and getting more and more warped. When I get invited to, say, speak at universities, I'm not sure if they are inviting Duke or Thompson. I'm not sure who to be.”
If nothing else, Thompson lived as though he were always close to the edge. Which, in a very real sense, he was. As his longtime friend and collaborator Ralph Steadman wrote, Thompson could never exist without the knowledge he could leave on his own terms:
“He told me 25 years ago that he would feel real trapped if he didn't know that he could commit suicide at any moment. I don't know if that is brave or stupid or what, but it was inevitable. I think that the truth of what rings through all his writing is that he meant what he said.”
Thompson’s recklessness was his armor and it served him well, until it no longer did. Embittered and suffering from chronic back pain, he took his own life on February 20, 2005, at the age of 67. The next time I left Dr. K’s office, my neck slowly regaining its natural pretzel shape, I reminded him of this fact. “Well sure,” he said. “He was obviously a depressive. I think it’s more your sense of humor I was getting at.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” I said, gingerly pulling my sweater over my head. “He really did make it all sound so cool. And you know, I never realized it before, but reading him really shaped me as a writer. The way he entered the story himself, peeling off these caustic and funny little shards. It’s something I aspire to do. But he never really turned the lens on himself.”
“Well, I’m sure you wouldn’t do that,” he said. “See you next time. Stay well…but not too well!”