Inside, Thompson works on his beloved typewriters, never upgrading to a computer, despite a weekly column on ESPN’s website. His brain works only as fast as he can type on a vintage Selectric. In conversation, he speaks in tight bursts, quickly stopping and starting, as if allowing his hands time to type. “I’veneverunderstood. Whatamemoir. Reallyis.” When he stumbles, which is frequent, the impression is that he’s stuck on a word. The constant derailments can be explained, perhaps, as lingual crossroads: how to write the story.When presented with an object of desire or potential Action he barrels ahead, his body language changing and thoughts focusing.

“I leave [Colorado] once every two months,” Thompson said. “In the past six months, I’ve been to Hawaii and LA. It’s getting harder and harder because of the planes. I fly first class,with all the advantages I can get, but—goddamn—it’s just getting more and more horrible. That’s intentional, I believe. That’s part of the overall plan to dumb the population down. A frightened population is obedient. They’re confused. They’re afraid. A fearful population is going to be easier, more malleable, more compliant. I wasn’t personally hassled [on the way to New York], but the breakdown of the system hassles everybody.”

“Politics is the art of controlling your environment,” Thompson is fond of saying. If politics is control and control is fear, then this well applies to Thompson’s personal style, from the abstract vultures atop Owl Farm’s gates (to ward off unwanted visitors) to the abrupt hammerings of his cane (keeping oddly subtle control through apparent unpredictability). For Thompson, politics is the base level at which humans communicate and it deeply bothers him when people make no attempt to engage.

“If you don’t do it—if you don’t participate in your life—someone else will. You’re either going to be aware of what’s happening around you, or you’re going to be a slave to it.” For his part, Thompson ran for sheriff of Aspen in 1970, waging a ridiculous (and widely documented) campaign on the Freak Power ticket, whose promises included renaming Aspen “Fat City” (to discourage tourism) and very nearly won. More recently, he has played an active role in the Fourth Amendment Foundation, founded in 1990 after he was acquitted in a privacy issues case to protect citizens from unlawful searches of their homes. Thompson is an avowed enemy of Timothy Leary’s “turn on, tune in, drop out” mantra. “I believed that the thing to do with acid was to eat it and go out and get involved in the public life.” He built steam. “Leary, that son-of-a-bitch, that fraud... I think he was the most horrible person to come out of all of the ‘60s. He advocated his way, which was the Guru way. You had to have a guide, and had to do things in a certain way, be in a room with certain lights, and have a certain high priest leading you. And that would be him, of course. I denounced Leary right from the beginning, even when I didn’t know that he was a working, hired informant for the FBI.”

When Thompson offers an unsympathetic account of the ‘60s, he’s not the one being a revisionist. He said the same thing at the time, as he fermented in the same San Franciscan ooze as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. He bemoans the lack of a contemporary counterculture. “Jerry Garcia was a friend,” he said. “He and I used to argue. He was totally against politics. He had nothing but contempt for my involvement, my running for sheriff. But I believe that until you personalize politics, you’re not gonna get anywhere. This war is not some distant thing. If every Deadhead voted, the country would be a different place.”

Thompson speaks of politics like an old General ready to fetch his tank in an age of personal rocketships. He calls music his “fuel”: Favorite albums like Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home and Los Lobos’ Kiko are valuable not because they are pleasurable escapes, but because they push him on.

Several times throughout Kingdom of Fear, there appears a quote, attributed alternately to Robert Kennedy, an 18th century British political theorist named Edmund Burke, and Thompson himself: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” When Thompson recited the dictum in the bar, his voice rose, as if looking for other patrons to join him in a moment of old-time solidarity.

Men of Action are needed. Taken as such, Gonzo is not too far removed from the bliss of the Beats, the Grateful Dead, or even Walt Whitman: being able to fully appreciate the capital-M Moment. Where Thompson splits with them, though, is his willingness to hone in on both ugliness and its consequences.

“My idea [for Vegas] was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication—without editing,” he proclaimed, describing undiluted Gonzo. It is romantic, to be sure, and Thompson has inspired more bad journalism than perhaps any other American writer. Gonzo is often equated with the ways Thompson chose to make himself the story, as opposed to what he actually wrote. “‘All you have to do is drink a little whiskey, smoke a joint, eat some acid, and you too can write like this!’” Thompson groused. “That’s as stupid as it sounds.”