Features

Celebrating Hunter S. Thompson’s 75th

Hunter S. Thompson would have been 75 today. In celebration of the legendary Gonzo journalist’s birthday, here’s a look back at our feature with Thompson that ran in the April-May 2003 issue of Relix.

Hunter S. Thompson’s eyes lit up when he saw the fireworks. “Hot damn, you’ve got Action!” he said, fondling the tightly packing bomb, running his fingers down its elegant spine-fuse and around its bulbous body. “This is real good shit. Real good.” Owing to the agreeable weather and it being the Chinese New Year and all, I’d suggested that we hop a cab over to Central Park and set off some fireworks.

Thompson pondered this and placed the firework on the car, amidst the slowly accumulating clutter between drink tumblers: two pairs of eyeglasses (one reading, one tinted), cigarettes (one half-smoked and burning, one mostly pull pack of Dunhill’s), an ugly brown cigarette holder (retrieved for him by his assistant, Anita, after he let forth a high-pitched squeal), a round plastic receptacle containing a white powder (ingested orally through a short sipping straw), several lighters (though he later pilfered my associate’s), and a copy of his new book, a memoir titled Kingdom of Fear (presented to Kevin, the bartender at Elaine’s, a New York City hangout for cops, writers and unrepentant smokers).

“You guys are gonna set that off outside, right?” Kevin asked nervously, remembering the time Thompson gargled Bacardi fireballs at the bar, nearly setting the place ablaze. He amiably refilled our glasses anyway, apparently without our noticing. Likewise, Thompson laid out his goods with a sleight of hand. One moment, we were sitting at the bar with just our drinks, the next moment, Thompson had a small arsenal of employable props. Each could be dissected as some key fragment of Thompson’s public persona, the character he carved for himself in half-mad, cocksure journalistic novels and autobiographical dispatches from his self-assigned beat, “the Death of the American Dream.”

In Hell’s Angels (1967), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973), The Great Shark Hunt (1979), and countless articles and straight acidic screeds, Thompson laid into American culture with broad fangs and endless bravado. It was this combination the turned him into a legendary figure forever associated with the fringe—drugs, guns, and nearly vengeful hippiedom—and caricatured to Thompson’s eternal displeasure, as Uncle Duke in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury.

At 65, Thompson is still raffish. His cartoony bow-legged walk is tempered slightly by the use of a hard wooden cane—though, lest anyone read it as a sign of deterioration, Thompson also used the cane to measure the fear instincts of nearby civilians by thwacking it soundly against the side of the bar.

Just over the frontal lobe of his brain, at the center of his white buttoned brim fishing cap, was a small cream-colored pin with the closest thing Thompson has to a logo: a sharp image of a cross formed by the intersection of a word in black text and a six-fingered fist stemming down to a dagger-like point and clenching an asterisk-shaped peyote button. The word, which crosses just below the palm, is “Gonzo.”