Gonzotic Pleasures
Hunter S. Thompson Is Dead and the Joke Really Is Over

He was there in 1970 for the Derby decadence, through two Fear and Loathings and well past The Curse of Lono.

By John Hood

The one and only time I saw Hunter S. Thompson was well back in the ‘80s, on an Election Night at The Ritz in New York. He’d been hired, as he often was in those days, to appear onstage and berate the mockery that this republic had by then become.

HST was good at that, natch; and he was also good at spectacle, though I don’t think he was ever conscious of being so. He just did what he did. And then he did it some more.

Anyway, on this night he showed with a bottle of Southern Comfort in one hand and a shotgun in the other and started slurring into the mike. No one thought twice about the gun, really; we were too busy trying to decipher his oracular, and then the gun went off. Bam! The shot may have taken out a klieg light, I don’t know. Between the loud and the flash and the surprise, there was no telling.

And there were no cops either. Wild men of genius weren’t arrested back then, no matter how prophetic and dangerous their wild was, and cops weren’t called in for accidents. It was a different time, when people handled their own shit and left cops with time enough to catch killers.

Twenty years later things are decidedly different, and not for the better either. The wild man was gunned down by his own hand and the cops are on everyone’s doorstep, enforcing the rigors of some litany called Law and Order. They’re breaking into our bedrooms, monitoring our chatter, riding our tails right outta the lives we live.

HST would not be happy.

I bring this up not because I’m all that discomfited by the police state of affairs (though, trust me, a police state does indeed discomfit me), but because Ralph Steadman, HST’s steadfast sidekick, is gonna be in town reading from his kickass chronicle, The Joke’s Over: Bruised Memories: Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson, and Me (Harcourt). Steadman of course knows a whole helluva lot more about the man than I do; I mean, he was there in 1970 for the Derby decadence (“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved”), through two Fear and Loathings (in Las Vegas and on the Campaign Trail) and well past The Curse of Lono. In fact, I think it was he who gave the two thumbs-up for the cannon-blasting of Thompson’s ashes. Steadman not only provided a visual counterpoint to HST’s scribbled Gonzo, he lent to it a transcendence it might have lacked if left to languish in plain old black and white. Even in death.

The man’s a beast, a savage satirist, and his art is beastly, deservedly so. Skewered and staked are about the best his victims get; at worst they get beheaded, then retrofit as the reptiles that their souls so resemble. Steadman turns ’em inside out, and when he’s done he calls the drawings “Perfect Gentlemen.”

And he should know. Hell, beyond the mud and the blood and the whisky, he’s one of only a fistful of gentlemen we’ve got left in this world.

See you at the beheading….

Ralph Steadman reads at 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 10 at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. 305-442-4408.

Hood’s blog can be found at www.therealjohnhood.com. Comments? E-mail letters@miamisunpost.com.