Letting Thompson just be Thompson

" ... few observed how close Thompson's exit was to his literary hero's, Ernest Hemingway.

In Gonzo, an oral history with no shortage of speculation, we learn that Thompson copied whole sections of Hemingway on his typewriter and went to Hawaii to catch a huge marlin "just like Hemingway," an incident later used for The Curse of Lono. In his Hemingway biography, James R. Mellow recounted an incident in which Wallace Stevens, unimpressed with the Hemingway legend, joked at a party, "By God I wish I had that Hemingway here now. I'd knock him out with a single punch." This resulted in a drunken brawl between the two men. Hemingway was indeed knocked down into a muddy puddle. Six years later, Stevens proposed that Hemingway speak at a Princeton poetry lecture.

This tendency to let Hemingway be Hemingway mirrors the remarkable tolerance that Thompson's friends had for his behavior. An Aspen neighbor recalls Thompson threatening his son with a cattle prod, but in the same breath declares how "he was always great to Juan." His landlord confesses to receiving irregular rent checks, but admires Thompson's motorcycle and is ordered to try high-grade mescaline.

Thompson's first wife, Sandy, is commanded around and has abortions that Thompson refuses to pay for. And yet, with pals, Thompson is willing to lend all the money he has and regularly dole out football bets. A keg of beer promised to the Hell's Angels upon the sale of Thompson's first book is sadly not honored, although Thompson does offer the keg to Sonny Barger, fresh out of jail 25 years later.

Like Hemingway, Thompson had a machismo that wouldn't quit. He ingested drugs and drink, often ordering "five or six Bloody Marys and twelve or fourteen lines of coke" for breakfast. His room service orders read like the demands of a junta. He had lungs and a liver to rival Charles Bukowski's and a high pain threshold, but was tremendously sensitive about depictions that didn't stem from his frenetic adrenaline. He came close to suing Garry Trudeau for the Duke character in Doonesbury, until an old roommate informed him, "This guy makes you out to be friendly and nice, basically. You're not."

Thompson's writing was frequently dazzling, as many of the snippets interspersed throughout Gonzo attest. But the arduous task of enabling Thompson to meet his deadlines was taken up by a revolving door of mostly female assistants, many of whom became his girlfriends, and surprisingly patient editors. Assistants read his work to him to cheer him up and get him writing, but often "couldn't breathe without getting yelled at." In Thompson's later years, Jann Wenner "couldn't get him writing strong or sustained pieces, long or short, for Rolling Stone" - this, for a 10-grand check on a 1,500-word piece. The carrot at the end of this short stick was the promise of Thompson's writing and his dazzlingly idiosyncratic charisma. ... "

~ Read on... ~