Bedtime for Gonzo : HUNTER:...

The last memorable thing I read by Hunter Thompson was written in his own hand on sheets from a legal pad. There were maybe a dozen pages in all, and atop the first one, he had printed NOT FOR PUBLICATION in red ink, a warning that forced the magazine editor showing me Thompson’s missive into grudging acquiescence.

The hell of it was, this was something the world should have seen--the good doctor of gonzo journalism carving up the pornographic film industry, skewering producers for their abject greed and at least one female star for being meaner than Roberto Duran. It was the foundation for a magazine piece that could have become a book, but it would be neither because that would have forced Thompson to attempt greatness in print. And he couldn’t do that in 1984 any more than he can now.

Beset by the demons of paranoia, fogged in by years of drink and drugs, perhaps strangling on a meanness that has finally turned inward, Thompson reigns as the foremost basket case in contemporary American letters. He hasn’t delivered a first-rate book since performing surgery without anesthetic on the ’72 presidential campaign, nor has he produced any vintage reportage since he used the Pulitzer divorce trial a decade ago as an excuse to disembowel Palm Beach society. If he has any place at all in the national consciousness today, it is as Uncle Duke in “Doonesbury,” a caricature he hates though it is shaped by his own words.

But all of the above does not diminish what used to be. At the peak of his powers, Thompson poured his work and his life in a Waring blender and whipped up the mesmerizing jumble that defined this country for a generation lurching from the hopelessness of the ‘60s into the awfulness of the Nixon years.

He could grab you with a single sentence, as in the opening of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” And he could level a target with a single image, as he proved by calling Hubert Humphrey “a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who ought to be put in a bottle and sent out with the Japanese tide.” Add his exotic punctuation and paragraphs that consisted of nothing but worlds like “Madness!”, and you had a writer who inspired as many bad prose styles as Tom Wolfe did. Thompson’s brand of anarchy, however, went far beyond words. Like Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs before him, he was a literary outlaw, and he put the spin of his era on that role. He rode with the Hell’s Angels, ran for sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket, watched Bill Murray portray him in a truly awful movie, and never left home without a pocket full of pharmaceuticals.

If you think we will see Thompson’s equal for sheer gall and self-abuse in this lifetime, get thee to a rubber room. And while you are there, read the three biographies of him that are butting heads in our bookstores. They aren’t the first of their kind and they almost certainly won’t be the last, but they do make two important points: One Hunter Thompson is enough, and so is one book about him.

The book I have in mind is E. Jean Carroll’s “Hunter,” a triumph of image-shattering oral history over parody so achingly awful I’m still not sure what was being parodied. But first allow me to dismiss Carroll’s competition, starting with “When the Going Gets Weird,” the dust jacket of which would have us believe that Peter O. Whitmer has written “a very unauthorized biography.” Very superficial is more like it. Whitmer doesn’t lay a glove on any number of potentially rich sources of information, and he tapdances around even something as serious as the fact that Thompson’s gay brother has AIDS. But maybe that’s to be expected from a writer who walked away from a single dinner meeting with Thompson thinking he had peered into the great man’s soul.

“Fear and Loathing” is hardly an improvement, though author Paul Perry assures readers in his preface that the biography they are holding is “violently unauthorized.” Personally, I can’t see anything so violent about the big, wet journalistic kiss he blows Thompson. What I see is the work of a sycophant who, in his days as an editor at Running magazine, sucked up to Thompson to coax a story out of him and hasn’t stopped since. The result is tacit approval of the bad habits that have short-circuited Thompson’s creativity and a refusal to pursue what cartoonist Ralph Steadman scrawled about his erstwhile partner in craziness on the book’s dust jacket: “Oh! That sleazy brain-damaged cretinous BASTARD! Don’t ask me about him.”

It could be one more gonzo put-on. But it isn’t, as E. Jean Carroll discovered by pressing the issue. “You don’t know what a terrible tongue-lashing I’d get from (Thompson),” Steadman explained in declining her request for an interview. “He can be pretty brutal when he wants to be. I won’t. I can’t. I won’t talk to you. I’m sorry. It’s just ridiculous. All I’d get is bloody hideous abuse. I can’t take any more.”

And there you have the essence of Hunter Stockton Thompson. Not savage intellect or rapier wit. Not unrestrained hedonism or mind-blown outrageousness. Just plain, ugly meanness.

It haunts one interview after another in “Hunter.” Thompson’s mother calls him “difficult from birth.” An anonymous family friend accuses him of pushing his mother down a flight of stairs. His brother, a truly pathetic figure, describes a lifetime of being alternately terrorized and ignored by him. Editors from his glory days at Rolling Stone recalls how his long-distance tirades drove one after another of them to tears. A witness to his idea of fun remembers how he would randomly call guests in whatever hotel he was in and verbally torture them. An old girl friend says he beat her. His ex-wife says he beat her, too--beat her again and again, until she stopped thinking she deserved it and walked out on him for good.

The picture that emerges is of a monster in a Hawaiian shirt, a monster spawned by a loveless family and perpetually enraged by the knowledge that there was a class above his that he would never belong to. Yet Carroll does her damnedest to trivialize Thompson by alternating chapters of oral history with the worst drivel you can imagine anyone writing. She creates an alter ego named Laetitia Snap and plops her in a hot tub with a Thompson who is nothing but a randier version of Uncle Duke. Why? So Carroll, whose past includes hard time as a cheerleader and a Saturday Night Live writer, can get dirty in print? So she can mimic what Terry Southern did better 30 years ago in “Candy”? So she can mock gonzo journalism by mixing fiction with fact until the reader doesn’t know which is which? Ultimately, the only thing I could do to preserve my sanity was stop asking questions--except, of course, the one about where Carroll’s editor was--and skip this nonsense altogether. For no fiction Carroll will ever write will be stranger than the truth about Thompson.

It was he, after all, who wandered the streets of Rio de Janeiro with a drunken, puking monkey in his pocket. And he who stole stereo equipment from Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner’s home (much to Wenner’s perverse delight, incidentally). And he who dueled novelist Thomas McGuane in a contest to see who could take more drugs.

Thompson was pushing the envelope as far back as high school in Louisville, drinking hard enough and raising enough hell to become the leader of a pack of well-born rummies posing as a literary society. If there was ever a chance he would change his low-down ways, it evaporated when he was arrested for robbery shortly before graduation and had to choose the Air Force over jail while his two accomplices blithely waltzed off to the Ivy League. In that moment, he seems to have decided that the outrageous was his milieu and he would become its master.

He succeeded outrageously. The critics would up comparing him to Twain, Gogol and Celine. Carroll calls him “the greatest stylist in the English language since Jane Austen,” though perhaps with tongue in cheek. George McGovern tells Carroll, in all seriousness, “that with a little more discipline (Thompson) might have been secretary of state or president of the United States.” And Thompson’s ex-wife confesses that, until the abuse became unbearable, “for me, Hunter was God.”

Thompson was no match for the idolatry. He may have thought he was when he was dropping acid with Jefferson Airplane or getting away with a mindless stroll in enemy territory in Vietnam, but it would all come crashing down on his swelled head soon enough. He was months late filing his story on the fall of Saigon. Then he went to Zaire for the Muhammed Ali-George Foreman fight and the only writing he did consisted of signing Nazi ghoul Martin Borman’s name to room service bills. And now he has degenerated to the point where he does nothing more interesting than get himself accused of tweaking a female porn film producer’s nipple. “The myth has taken over,” Carroll quotes Thompson as saying in a documentary. “I’m really in the way as a person.”

Carroll had to turn to an outside source because Thompson stopped talking to her on the record as soon as he realized that she was an interviewer who knew exactly which buttons to push. But then he no longer appears to trust many people beyond the college girls who shack up with him. Look one way and there’s George Plimpton telling Carroll, “If people don’t know much about writing, Hunter’s probably the most popular American writer.” Look the other way and there’s the owner of Jerry’s, the San Francisco bar where the Rolling Stone staff used to hang out, saying nobody talks about Thompson these days; they’re more interested in his former stablemate, Joe Eszterhas, whose “Basic Instinct” screenplay sold for $3 million.

Nothing surprising about that. We cast aside an icon of pop culture every 15 minutes. But Thompson is too vain, too starved for attention, to simply go away. So he takes sustenance from the promise of a novel that must also drive him mad, a novel he may never finish writing. And every once in a while, he gets paid to haunt a college auditorium as a ghost of the ‘60s.

He stumbles drunkenly around the stage, insulting everybody he can think of, turning even nastier when someone dares insult him back, and wondering how much more of this crap he must endure before he can pick up his check and go back home to Colorado. It is an act, a charade, and yet it reveals what Hunter Thompson has become, and likely will remain the rest of his days. Just another dancing bear.