What Hunter S. Thompson Brought With Him

Plumb revels in the ballsy nature of Hunter S. Thompson and his connections to the Hell's Angels.

From the post...


Hunter S. Thompson spent some time with the Hells Angels motorcycle club. He wrote a book about it in the sixties. He was beat down and then he wrote about it. It’s what Thompson would do before football season was over. Confronted directly by a member of the infamous club during a television interview, Thompson stood his ground. Maintained his position that what he wrote about was honest and written about to the best of his abilities.

Balls of steel. Giant steel balls. EPCOT-sized balls.

I reread Hells Angels, Thompson’s book about his year with the HAMC, very recently. It made me want to buy guns for some reason. I did not buy guns, but I did acquire a .380 handgun with an extra six-shell clip for which I’ve yet to secure actual shells. I point it at myself in the mirror, see the size of the barrel in the reflection and it reminds me that although the .380 is compact, the hole it will leave would be about the size of a quarter. That would hurt, folks. I think we all could agree.

Balls.

And, speaking of Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is 40-years-old. The Millions revels in it.

From that piece...

The first thing that strikes you when you read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in 2011, beyond the rotary phones and the 29-cent burgers, is what a sad story it is. Don’t get me wrong; parts of it are still very funny. It is a tribute to Thompson’s comic genius that all these years later Raoul Duke’s acid-fueled description of entering a Vegas hotel bar can make a grown man like me, whose druggie years are decades in the past, laugh so hard he snorts ginger ale out of his nose:

Terrible things were happening all around us. Right next to me a huge reptile was gnawing on a woman’s neck, the carpet was a blood-soaked sponge – impossible to walk on it, no footing at all. “Order some golf shoes,” I whispered. “Otherwise, we’ll never get out of this place alive. You notice these reptiles don’t have any trouble moving around in this muck – that’s because they have claws on their feet.

But for long stretches the book reads like an all-too-accurate description of a weeklong binge, with all the shapelessness and pointlessness that implies. Minor characters appear and disappear with barely a ripple, plans are meticulously devised and abandoned, weapons are drawn in murderous rage and then moments later forgotten, and when all is said and done it adds up to not very much. Duke doesn’t get either of the stories he is sent to Las Vegas to get, he never finds the American Dream, and by the end, when his plane out of Vegas lands in Colorado, he is so addled he literally doesn’t know where he is.