Prime time for gonzo

Scott Dickensheets

Tuesday, Nov. 26, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

I was somewhere around my byline on the edge of this story when the drugs took hold ... suddenly there was a terrible roar around my desk and the newsroom was full of what looked like huge city hall reporters, all swooping and screeching and diving ... my editor was pouring beer on his chest to facilitate the spell-checking process ... (indecipherable shouting, garble) ...

Well, that's that. So ends another stab at faux gonzo journalism, not with a bang but a garble. That's how it usually goes when someone other than Hunter S. Thompson is at the wheel; you only have to crack open nearly any college or alternative newspaper to see how bad imitation gonzo can be. The only good gonzo is Dr. Gonzo, and there's only one: Thompson himself, the abominable snowman of American writing -- large and wild, occasionally threatening, at least partly mythical.

He pops up now and then to commit journalism -- vivid, darkly textured, brutally funny stuff -- and some of his most conspicuous bigfooting took place here in Las Vegas, captured in all its vulgar glory in Thompson's classic second book, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

Now this rough beast, its hour come round at last, is slouching toward something like respectability. Or, more precisely, respectability is heading for him. "Fear and Loathing" is now officially a classic: Random House is marking the book's 25th anniversary with a spiffy new Modern Library edition, adding it to the series of uniform volumes of Great Big Literature deemed timeless or especially noteworthy. Marcel Proust, Herman Melville ... Hunter S. Thompson. It's a much better class of bookshelf than Dr. Gonzo customarily hangs out on.

It doesn't stop there. Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville Records has just released an all-star audio version of "Fear and Loathing," featuring the voices of Harry Dean Stanton, Buffett, Harry Shearer, Buck Henry, George Segal, Laraine Newman and others.

There's more: Alex Cox, cultish director of "Repo Man," recently told Vanity Fair he intends to film the book soon.

It amounts to quite a canon blast for such a determinedly renegade writer, and it makes you wonder: Did anyone actually read the book before authorizing its elevation? Or did Modern Library just want to add a little counterculture dash to its roster? Because there is serious drug use in there. Serious, unrepentant drug use. Not to mention petty criminality, jumped hotel bills, gunfire. Sample passage: "We had sampled everything else, and now -- yes, it was time for a long snort of ether." Is this the stuff of Modern Library?

"It's a modern-day classic," says Ian Jackman, Modern Library's managing director. Despite the drugs, they couldn't just say no; the book had too much literary merit. "It speaks to its times as few other books have done," Jackman says.

"Fear and Loathing" is the mad tale of Thompson's alter ego, Raoul Duke, and his "300-pound Samoan attorney," who come to Las Vegas to cover the Mint 400 in 1971 and found themselves caught up in "a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream." Which seems to mean, mostly, that Duke and his attorney take drugs and terrorize hotel staff, trash their rooms, brandish a big knife, vomit frequently and behave with a general lack of responsibility. A classic indeed.

That slim precis, of course, does scant justice to the book's crazed, swooping humor; you could pack three articles like this merely by skimming its best lines. Thompson gets off funny, pained insights into what he saw as America's fall from '60s grace into the wine press of '70s conformity and good citizenship. "Fear and Loathing" is both an elegy for the open-ended freedoms of the Acid Generation and a defiant gesture toward the Nixon years. "Our trip was a gross physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country," he wrote, "but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that."

Las Vegas was the perfect setting, a town built on the notion of fantastic possibilities yet still conservative. "Vegas in those days stood for everything the country pretended not to be about," says Chicago writer Craig Vetter, a Thompson crony.

The ratio of fact to fiction in the book has long been a subject of speculation. That he took some imaginative license is clear -- the Mint 400 and the district attorneys drug-abuse convention, "Fear and Loathing's" two main plot engines, took place months apart, not back to back as in the book. "As far as I was concerned," Thompson said in a recent Rolling Stone interview, "I was just writing about what happened to me in Las Vegas. It was just in the gonzo thinking, taking it one step further."

An instant hit when it appeared in Rolling Stone, "Fear and Loathing" hasn't lost its kick. "I think it's a tour de force," says UNLV English Professor John Irsfeld. "It's a good matchup between Hunter Thompson, his state of mind and Las Vegas, the time and place. I think when Hunter Thompson came to Las Vegas, he felt he was at normal speed."

"He became something of a Mark Twain for our generation," says Vetter, bringing to mind Duke and his attorney as a cranked Huck and Tom; instead of a raft, a red hot rod and a white Caddy. "'Fear and Loathing' has reached beyond its time," Vetter says.

"He has a wonderfully musical sense of language. His eye and his ear are flawless. Of course, it's a violently musical sense. He once told me, 'I like to string words together into a chain and beat people with it.'"

You have to remember the era in which the book appeared. Vietnam, civil rights, young vs. old, freedom vs. conformity, Us vs. Them. "It rendered that vividly and sharply," Vetter says. "This was a book for Us."

Only now it's being embraced by Them. This seems so ... so ... Establishment for "America's quintessential outlaw journalist" as Thompson's book jackets tout him. Sure, he's been a cult figure for decades, he's a house god in newsrooms across the land, and he's flirted with the best-seller list more than once, but Modern Library?

"This feels tantamount to to naming a 40-ounce bottle of Ballantine Ale a 'fine wine' or finding an exceptional Hustler centerfold on the walls of the Smithsonian," Cintra Wilson wrote in Salon, a magazine on the World Wide Web. "Gonzo ... is its own autonomous, yet equally important and relevant, Thing."

While "Fear and Loathing" "seems a little bit beyond the envelope of what (Modern Library) normally publishes," Vetter's not exactly surprised that room was made for a mad dog like Thompson. After all, "Fear and Loathing" has already had a long bookshelf life. "It's been selling steadily and heavily for years," Vetter notes, "so Random House is doing itself as much a favor as Hunter Thompson."

Regarding concerns about slapping the Modern Library imprint on so dope fiendish a book, Jackman says no one's raised any.

"Modern Library isn't meant to be a stuffy or staid imprint," Jackman says. "We like to think it's alive and lively."

By all accounts, Thompson is pleased by the turn of events. A recent Newsweek article on the Modern Library reissue portrayed him as a contented old hipster. "I'm sure he's pleasantly surprised," adds Vetter, who hasn't talked to Thompson in about a year.

This is just the latest round of gonzomania; Thompson has been a pop-culture fixture for years. The "Doonesbury" character Uncle Duke is based on him, a fact Thompson is famously unhappy about. Hollywood took a ham-fisted swing at his life story with 1980's "Where the Buffalo Roam," a flop distinguished only by Bill Murray's uncanny Thompson impersonation and the final voice-over, in which he intones "it still hasn't gotten weird enough for me." A few years ago, there was a sudden and inexplicable rush of three Thompson biographies.

Although Thompson had written a near-classic book on the Hell's Angels before "Fear and Loathing," it's the Vegas book that is the bedrock of his legend, and it set the tone for much of the work to follow: Every article a grudge match -- between Thompson and the subject, Thompson and his editors, Thompson and himself. He went on to write a book about presidential politics -- "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72" -- and has basically been sounding variations on that theme ever since, every piece a fear and loathing of something.

Lately, despite occasional flashes of the old Doc Gonzo, he's seemed too addled to write up to Modern Library standards. The infamous drug inventory from "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" -- "two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid ... and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers" -- has come to seem like a chronicle of brain death foretold.

So, finally, what does it mean for the republic when we let a book like "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" into the stable of notable literature? It could mean that Bob Dole was right after all about the mainstreaming of deviancy, and maybe this heralds the imminent doom of American values in a conflagration of pop culture squalor. Or maybe it just means that despite Dennis Rodman and "The X-Files" and the "Macarena," it still hasn't gotten weird enough for us.

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