Tuesday February 22, 2005

Hunter Becomes The Hunted

The news of Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide reminded me of the time I tried to give him a call. I was working on a story about The Proud Highway, the first volume of his letters, for a New Orleans magazine called Tribe. The hook was that the book’s editor, Douglas Brinkley, taught at the University of New Orleans. Brinkley tried to set me up with the good doctor, but gave me a private number, leading to what I understood to be a late night paranoid freakout. Tribe went out of business before the story appeared, and I eventually sold it to Yall.com, which is also long gone. The full story, which includes details about my many phone calls to Woody Creek, is after the jump.

The one thing I got from the early letters — and from my interview with Brinkley — was just how disciplined a writer Thompson was, at least early on, and how self-aware he was about the “Hunterfigure” he was creating. This is very clear in the structure of a piece like “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” in which Thompson went in search of the archetypal debauched Southern gentleman, only to find it in a mirror in his hotel room.

He made it look easy. Maybe too easy for later magazine journalism, which picked up the Gonzo strain of New Journalism — rather than, say, Gay Talese’s humble variety, in which the writer goes to great, passive-voice-fueled lengths, to keep himself out of frame — and ran with it, often with awful, solipsistic results. Thompson’s descendants, by and large, received only half the message. The second half is this: If you’re going to put yourself in the story, you’d better make sure you’re one pretty interesting motherfucker.

The story that resulted from my non-brush with Thompson, in which I don’t exactly take my own advice, follows:

It’s late at the Holiday Inn in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi — the gateway to the casino coast that will one day make the state either fabulously rich or more despondent than ever — and Im trying to stay awake.

I’m trying to stay awake until it’s late enough to put in a call to Hunter S. Thompson in Colorado so I can ask him an innocuous question or two about the first volume of The Fear and Loathing Letters. There’s an hour time-change, and I’ve been told to call late, he keeps odd hours.

Earlier in the day, I called a number two or three times that had a strange tinny scream on the answering machine at the other end. It was the wrong number, a private one I wasn’t supposed to have. It sparked phone calls, although not to me, and now I’m keeping myself up by imagining Thompson as he must have looked this morning, standing at his typewriter with sidearm drawn, screaming at his telephone.

Sitting there in a casino boomtown that already looks half spent, it occurs to me that the proper hands might find a poem in there, or at the very least a folk song by some old stoner mourning the days when the good times rolled, casinos meant Vegas, and Thompson was just beginning to transform himself into the acid-eyed, gun-crazed Dr. Gonzo.

But it’s late and I’m tired, and frankly I’m just hoping there’s a magazine article in it somewhere.

I’d come to Bay St. Louis in the first place to meet with Douglas Brinkley, director of the University of New Orleans’ Eisenhower Center for American Studies about the Hunter S. Thompson Letters Project, and hopefully to talk to Thompson himself, if only by phone. Brinkley had given me the private number with the tinny screams by mistake, but said it had all been ironed out.

As it turns out, the thing that solidified Brinkley’s reputation as America’s “cool teacher” — the one that always wears jeans and lets you swear in class — is also what led to his editing the letters. His book The Majic Bus: An American Odyssey — based on his 1992 “on the road” course, during which he and his students took a six week tour of the U.S. in a sleeper bus and dropped in on a range of notable American places and personalities — had garnered lots of attention.

Although Thompson’s Owl Farm compound in Woody Creek, Colorado, wasn’t one of the stops on that inaugural tour, Brinkley pulled his students through a local tavern the following year, when Thompson honored all comers by riddling their copies of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with pistol fire.

Later that year, Brinkley returned to Woody Creek to lend a hand in compiling Thompson”s Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junky. As one might imagine, Thompson-as-collaborator can be tough on the nerves. “When I first came out there, he tried to scare me an awful lot,” Brinkley recalls, “by like driving his red convertible, picking me up and then almost going off a mountain road, and putting a piece of dynamite over my head and blowing it up.”

Their relationship settled down once the hazing passed, and talk of the letters book began in 1995. Thompson was a compulsive letter writer, and the sheer size of the archive — locked tight in the vault-like basement at Owl Farm awaiting its inevitable sale to a university — is immense.The first volume alone, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman 1955-1967, includes over two hundred letters, close to seven hundred pages, and for every letter that’s included, fifteen had to be cut.

While the quantity of correspondence and the fastiduousness with which Thompson socked it away is itself surprising, it is not the only surprising thing about The Proud Highway. Composed of letters dating from his days as a high school misfit in Louisville through the career-making publication of Hell’s Angels, the volume shows even the young Thompson to be possessed of a considerable amount of gall. That’s not so surprising. What is, however, is how well it served him.

In a particularly fiery exchange with William Kennedy — the then-editor of the San Juan Star who went on to win a Pulitzer in the eighties for his novel Ironweed — Thompson accuses him of being an example of “the cretin-intellect responsible for the dry-rot of the american press” among other things. Rather than this being the end of their contact, however, the exchange sparked a life long friendship, evidenced by Kennedy’s Foreword to the letters. And while the technique likely failed as often as it prevailed, others — including Washington Post and Newsweek publisher Philip Graham — responded sympathetically to Thompson’s abuse.

The reason why is made clear in the letters. The kid could really write, and those he wrote to had no choice but to recognize it. Almost by sheer force of will — he typed whole pages out of Fitzgerald and Hemingway to discover the secrets of their style — Thompson transformed himself into a writer.

Along the way, he transformed himself into the acid-eyed, gun-crazed Dr. Gonzo of myth. Even as a young man writing to family and friends he makes the distinction between his true self and the “Hunterfigure” he is in the process of creating. If there was ever a case for writers being made rather than born, The Proud Highway is it.

When we meet, Brinkley’s study is littered with photocopies of Thompson’s correspondence, scribblings, and miscellaneous ephemera: from a letter to Lyndon Johnson on Holiday Inn stationary volunteering for the governorship of American Samoa, to rough drafts of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, to napkin-scribbled odes to bottles of Jack Daniels. After reading the book, and perhaps under its influence, these are the things I wanted to see and talk to Thompson about, just to look past the uniform typography to see what the raw materials looked like. As Brinkley points out, all the typing is amazingly clean and crisp; rarely is a word crossed out or changed, giving the impression that each letter was written in a concerted burst of determination.

Through the project, he’s become pretty good friends with the author, talking to him a couple times a day, and making trips back and forth to Colorado to rummage through the basement archive. Thompson sometimes makes the reverse trip as well, spending a few weeks a year in New Orleans and Bay St. Louis.

A second volume of letters is already in the works, tentatively titled The Age of Nixon and covering the years from 1968 to 1975. There will be a third volume that goes up to 1992, and possibly a fourth.

As we rifle through stacks of photocopies, I try to get a sense of the Hunter Thompson behind the myth.

“Sometimes people don’t realize that Hunter has created Hunter,” Brinkley says, “There’s the myth of Hunter Thompson, which is Raoul Duke, and then there’s Hunter Thompson the real person. What’s been amazing to me to see is how few people he lets see that real person, and how he’s created this sort of legend about his writing.”

“He’s both a kind of old-fashioned believer in democratic virtures, but also an anarchist,” he says of the real Thompson he’s gotten to know. “There’s always that unpredicatable element with him. In any given situation, as soon as he feels there’s a system closing in, he’ll destroy it.”

As Brinkley talks about Hunter having “his own code” and how he hates booksignings and how he won’t go on the Jay Leno show, I look forward to talking to the “real person” he’s telling me about. Before I head to the motel, he gives me another phone number and assures me that Hunter has been warned.

I wake up at about four o’clock, and sit on the side of the bed and dial the number. The message on the other end is as usual as it can be, a woman’s voice, presumably Deborah Fuller, Thompson’s assistant. I leave a message, say Doug told me to call, and leave my number.

Since then, I’m sure I’ve worn out that poor, normal sounding machine after calling it more times than I can count, sometimes every day for a week at a time, from all sorts of places, saying everything I can think of that might make someone — anyone — interested in returning the call.

No luck.

The book wasn’t always going to be called The Proud Highway, Brinkley had told me. There had been a long list of other titles to choose from. The Grapes of Gonzo was one of them; Speed Kills was another. Thompson thought of it as a sort of “guide for freelancers” and had even considered calling it that, because — as Brinkley said — he’s never forgotten where he came from.

On the other hand, if anyone happens to ask me for my “guide for freelancers,” it won’t take four books, or even one. I’ll just give them this story and Thompson’s private phone number.

I’m sure there’s a magazine article in it somewhere.