Feel the Loving

First published in Phlogiston Twenty-Four, February 1990.

For once, this doesn’t have anything to do with science fiction. But Alex asked specially for this one—so here it is.

One of the formative influences of my youth was a film I never saw. The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando, was considered to be such a violent and frightening film that it was banned in England. It was concerned with the depredations of a motor cycle gang who terrorised a town somewhere in the back blocks of small-town America. Brando had an Elvis Presley sneer and a black leather jacket. You can still buy posters of him astride his bike.

We knew the film only by reputation and because we could not see it, the violence associated with it grew in the telling and the motor cycle gangs were regarded as the epitome of evil; violence personified. They were scarcely human and we shivered with delicious fright, secure in the knowledge that not only didn’t we have them here in England, we couldn’t even see the film anyway.

(Years later when all the fuss had died down I saw the film on television. Predictably, it was very tame. Brando got the girl and turned into a good guy.)

The motor cycle gangs had a bad press and the uncontrolled violence associated with their name together with the almost ritualistic (and vaguely militaristic) organisation of the gangs gave them the excitement of pornography. Chapters being chartered, rules about how to conduct initiations, the “all for one and one for all” attitude (if you stomp on an Angel, twenty of them will stomp on you)—all these things were undeniably exciting. There was also the romance of the outlaw, the rebel against society. Ironically an attitude that was encouraged by that same society—it was the age of the beatnik; Jack Kerouac was On the Road and James Dean was a Rebel without a Cause.

It was in this frame of mind that I got my first exposure to Hunter S. Thompson. Penguin Books published Hells Angels, the book which, promised the blurb, told the true and violent history of the motor cycle gangs. I bought the book expecting lots of lurid descriptions of rapes and beatings. I had never heard of Thompson. I expected pulp and pornography and cheap thrills. What I got was probably the most fascinating description of a society within society that I have ever read. (If you never read anything else by Thompson, read this one. It is his masterpiece.)

Thompson joined the Angels. He rode with them, partied with them and eventually got beaten up by them. He wrote it all down. He investigated the history of the motor cycle gangs and showed where they came from (they have a longer history than you might believe) and he described the personalities, bringing the Angels alive as people.

The book was a huge success in the 1960s. It made Thompson’s reputation and was instantly fashionable. Hollywood even made a film (called, if memory serves, Hells Angels ’69) which starred the actual members of the Hells Angels chapter that Thompson rode with. It is a terrible film (it’s available here on video if you want to try it out, but honestly I can’t recommend it). The Angels are obviously enjoying themselves hugely as they get paid real money to roar up and down on their bikes with great big shit-eating grins on their faces. They have make-believe Hollywood fights where nobody’s eyes get gouged out, nobody’s teeth and jaws shatter and no broken bones stick out through the flesh. It is just a traditional western on bikes, and just about as real. Hollywood Angels are made out of tinsel.

Thompson was a journalist for Rolling Stone at the height of that magazine’s influence. In the 1960s and the 1970s Rolling Stone was the arbiter of contemporary taste. Thompson, and other journalists of the time, were exploring the language. They were concerned with getting it said in ways that it had never been said before. They called it gonzo journalism and the language held up a mirror to the times. It was wild and highly coloured, full of drug images and occasionally incoherent. But it was always exciting. The gonzo tradition gave us Tom Wolfe and radical chic and the kandy-kolored tangerine-flake streamlined baby. It gave us Michael Herr and Despatches which, despite all the recent outpourings on the subject, remains the best book yet to come out of the war in Vietnam.

In a way, the gonzo writers were attempting to do for journalism what the poets and songwriters were doing for music.

There was a perceived need to strip away the false coverings, to tell it like it is. What you needed was total involvement. You had to be your material. You couldn’t see it from the outside looking in. That was too distant. You had to be inside looking out.

Tom Wolfe was probably the best of these writers. He got more closely into the heart of his subjects than any of the others. The cynicism he displayed in Radical Chic, the essay which exposed the shallowness of fashion, high society and the beautiful people has never been bettered.

Interestingly, while Thompson was riding with the Angels and gathering the material for his book, Tom Wolfe was investigating Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. It was inevitable, I suppose, that the two would cross each others paths. Kesey seemed to see in the Angels a wild, free spirit that needed cultivating. He turned the Angels on to acid and they prowled menacingly around his parties intimidating people. Their grip on reality was never all that strong at the best of times. With a head full of psychedelics who knew what would happen? The Angels, characteristically, over-indulged. It was not Kesey’s most popular move.

Thompson relates one episode which epitomised the Angel’s reactions to drugs. An Angel, visiting the bathroom, investigated the medicine cabinet. Finding some pills in an unlabelled box, he ate a handful or two on the theory that they might prove to be interesting. He spent the next forty eight hours unconscious and barely breathing. Everyone assumed he was dead. When he came round he declared that doing what he had done had taught him a valuable lesson which he would never forget. It didn’t matter how many or what sort of drugs he indulged in. The experience had taught him that his body would be able to cope.

Thompson’s book and Wolfe’s biography of Ken Kesey (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) share a common ground in this meeting of the Angels and the “hippies”. They tell the tale from both sides, and it makes interesting reading to compare the two.

In his experiments with language, Thompson coined a phrase all of his own and applied it to the things he saw around him.

That phrase is now inextricably associated with him (and he’s probably sick of it). It is the Hunter Thompson trademark and it is “Fear and Loathing”. He attached it to a town and gave us what became one of the biggest cult books of the era—Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

I think it’s a novel—I hope it’s a novel because if Thompson ever really did ingest all the drugs which the first-person hero of the book pours into his body with such gay abandon it is no surprise that his prose is as brain-damaged and deranged as it is.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the epitome of the drug era. It says everything that needs to be said about that wild time. Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary said it first of course, but they were too deep down serious about it all. There was always a sense of missionary zeal about the Merry Pranksters which tended to get in the way. Thompson had no such inhibitions. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, if it is about anything at all, is about getting totally wasted, and staying that way for as long as possible.

It is also, without question, the funniest book I have ever read. I suppose I must have read it at least a dozen times now; probably more. However it still reduces me to helpless hysterics. Even just thinking about it makes me smile.

Everyone has their favourite scene, and everbody’s favourite scene is different. Take, for instance, the hotel bar, observed through a haze of drugs:

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 lizards don’t have any trouble moving around in this muck—that’s because they have claws on their feet.”

And a little later, in a Las Vegas nightclub where he finds a machine that will project his magnified image on a screen in the sky:

But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip—the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas, twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

For a long time after that Thompson seemed to go quiet. There were no more books. There were still articles in Rolling Stone and other journals, but I seldom saw these. I was a very erratic magazine buyer. The next time I really became aware of Thompson was the publication of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail which is an account of the Presidential campaign of 1972. Thompson was heavily into politics. He hated Nixon, of course, but Nixon liked football and so did Thompson. He reports that he has many pleasant memories of discussing football with Nixon. (Incidentally, Thompson had the measure of the man well before any other American journalist. He recognised the immorality that lay behind the facade and predicted the scandal that was Watergate years before it took place simply from his knowledge of Nixon’s personality.)

This is probably Thompson’s most difficult book, particularly if you are not very interested in the minutiae of American politics and presidential campaigns. Nonetheless, it still sings with Thompson’s own peculiar vigour and his skill in concocting memorable aphorisms is just as strong as ever. (“When a man comes off drugs he needs big fires in his life”.)

It is almost impossible to talk about Hunter S. Thompson without also talking about Ralph Steadman, the illustrator of his books and Thompson’s deranged alter ego. The two of them go together like sado and masochism. Who will ever forget his sketch of a stark naked Samoan attorney vomiting copiously while a hotel maid looks on in horror?

Once, newly introduced to acid, Thompson accidentally spilled some of the drug (and its substrate).

… one of the musicians came in. “What’s the trouble?” he said.

“Well,” I said, “all this white stuff on my sleeve is LSD.”

He said nothing: merely grabbed my arm and began sucking on it. A very gross tableau. I wondered what would happen if some Kingston Trio/young stockbroker type might wander in and catch us in the act…with a bit of luck it’ll ruin his life—forever thinking that just behind some narrow door in all his favourite bars, men in red Pendleton shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he’ll never know. Would he dare to suck a sleeve? Probably not. Play it safe. Pretend you never saw it…