Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson

This book probably changed my life more than it should have. First published in 1971, I read it as a hand-me-down paperback from someone's older brother, when I was an American middle school student in the late 70's. The opening lines are iconic:

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive....' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'"

As a literary stylist, the late Hunter S. Thompson was known for his "gonzo journalism" approach: this tale is based on a true story, meaning some liberties are taken with the facts. On the gradient between fiction and nonfiction, this memoir-as-fable falls somewhere between the realms of "nonfiction novel" and "roman a clef." Huckleberry Finn might call it "mostly a true book, with some stretchers."

The second paragraph:

"Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. 'What the hell are you yelling about?' he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. 'Never mind,' I said. 'It's your turn to drive.' I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough."

The book's subtitle, A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, gives a hint of our author's broader scope: a certain moment in American history where the drug-fueled and rebellious late 60s counterculture crash-landed in the early 70s. First published as a two-part serial in Rolling Stone magazine, the story is enhanced by the cartoonishly grotesque ink illustrations of Ralph Steadman.

[A couple links to some good images of those.]

It starts as a road trip. American variations on this classic odyssey/journey/quest motif include the aforementioned Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (the Great American Novel of the 19th century) and On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957, influential but overrated - Scott's perspicacious review is here.)

On the Road actually shares a character ("Dean Moriarty" aka Neal Casady) with another famous book involving another epic American road trip: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968). Which I also read in junior high, and which also arguably had more of an impact on me than it probably should've, and which Scott also reviewed, brilliantly and hilariously, here.

I learned a thing or two from Fear and Loathing (henceforth "F&L"), and from Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and I guess they deserve some ... credit? (blame?) for inspiring me to adopt some, ah, freethinking tendencies when it comes to better living through chemistry.

Reading F&L again, more than four decades later, I debated whether its effect on my younger self was beneficial or otherwise (a bit of both?)

I wouldn't claim Disreputable Books corrupted my poor innocent little mind, since I was deliberately seeking out questionable influences of my own volition. I was eager to try any book which would qualify as scandalous. Isn't every 12- or 13-year-old at least a little suspicious of Respectable Grownup Culture and all the Approved Messages the grownups try to pawn off on you? Like a lot of other kids, I was primed for a more cynical perspective, and decidedly receptive to the sardonic, picaresque charm of lines like:

"Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the desert sun."

Our narrator, Hunter S. Thompson's alter ego, goes by "Raoul Duke." He is (like Thompson) a journalist. The ostensible purpose of this trip is to cover the Mint 400 off-road race for Sports Illustrated.

The Mint 400 is held annually in the desert outside Vegas: the 4th annual race is the one featured in the book. F&L did begin as a Sports Illustrated article which Thompson was supposed to write, but the tale grew in the telling until it mutated into something much stranger and more significant.

The book's epigraph is a quote from Samuel Johnson: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man," and its aptness is clear from the first page.

The preparations for this journey from California to Vegas are described: our protagonists have rented a giant, "fireapple-red" Chevy convertible and filled its trunk with a supply of beer, tequila, rum, and an impressively diverse collection of illicit drugs. After enumerating these, our narrator notes "The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon."

Duke's partner in crime is his 300 lb. Samoan attorney called Dr. Gonzo, a fictionalization of Thompson's friend Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, a Chicano attorney, author, and noted drug enthusiast who disappeared in Mexico in 1974.

Dr. Gonzo is fond of dispensing legal advice like "As your attorney I advise you to get the chiliburger. It's a hamburger with chili on it," and "As your attorney, I advise you to tell me where you put the goddamn mescaline."

Duke and Gonzo's near-constant consumption of LSD and mescaline throughout the story is noteworthy. The psychonaut mentality characteristic of hallucinogen devotees is one thing. The self-destructive debauchery exemplified by their indiscriminate consumption of virtually every other controlled substance known to man is another. Our "heroes" in this book manage to combine the two. They are never once described as sober, spending the entire story under the influence of something or other - usually multiple, powerful, mind-altering substances at once.

Quite a few songs from the era are referenced throughout F&L. The two which feature most prominently are the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil," and Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit." As their journey begins, our dynamic duo have "Sympathy for the Devil" cranked to maximum volume on a portable tape recorder, and are listening to it on repeat, as a "demented counterpoint" to the car radio.

So, out of their heads on mescaline and casually drinking beers, they drive off with the top down at top speed on a bright desert highway to Las Vegas. Of course, they impulsively decide to pick up a young fellow hitchhiking along the way. But this leads to some paranoid thoughts.

"How long can we maintain? I wondered. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection when my attorney starts screaming about bats and huge manta rays coming down on the car? If so -- well, we'll just have to cut his head off and bury him somewhere."

This is the first instance of a recurring motif: the contrast between thoughts of horror/violence and ridiculous behavior.

Every over-the-top, out-of-control, potentially ultraviolent episode in the book is played for laughs: it's a type of transgressive comedy that would only become more popular in subsequent decades.

Dr. Gonzo suddenly pulls the car over with no warning and slumps over the steering wheel, demanding "medicine." Duke gives him a couple of amyl nitrate capsules - "'Don't worry,' I said. 'This man has a bad heart.... But we have the cure for it.'" Duke then helps himself to a capsule.

The "medicine" kicks in right away: Dr. Gonzo "fell back on the seat, staring straight up at the sun. 'Turn up the fucking music!' he screamed. 'My heart feels like an alligator!'"

As both protagonists are laughing uncontrollably, the hitchhiker slips out of the car and runs off, yelling "'Thanks a lot. I like you guys. Don't worry about me.'"

"I yelled 'Come back and get a beer.' But apparently he couldn't hear me. The music was very loud, and he was moving away from us at good speed."

There's a temptation here to just quote huge swaths of the book. If the story so far sounds entertaining to you, I highly recommend reading it - if not, don't bother. Or I guess you could just hate-read it in an afternoon: it's only about 200 pages long.

Duke and Gonzo reach their destination and, despite several drug-induced challenges, manage to check into their hotel room.

"By this time the drink was beginning to cut the acid and my hallucinations were down to a tolerable level. ... I was no longer seeing huge pterodactyls lumbering around the corridors in pools of fresh blood. The only problem now was a gigantic neon sign outside the window, blocking our view of the mountains -- millions of colored balls running around a very complicated track, strange symbols & filigree….

'Look outside,' I said.

'Why?'

'There's a big . . . machine in the sky, . . . some kind of electric snake . . . coming straight at us.'

'Shoot it,' said my attorney.

'Not yet,' I said. 'I want to study its habits.'"

The following day, Duke makes an effort to cover the Mint 400 race. But this proves nearly impossible because the off-road course is so large and the motorcycles are kicking up so much desert dust: "our visibility was down to something like fifty feet ... the incredible dustcloud that would hang over this part of the desert for the next two days was already formed up solid."

Abandoning the race, Duke and Dr. Gonzo set out for an evening on the town. Their antics get them thrown out of the Desert Inn, so:

"I drove around to the Circus-Circus Casino and parked near the back door. 'This is the place,' I said. 'They'll never fuck with us here.'

'Where's the ether?' said my attorney. 'This mescaline isn't working.'

I gave him the key to the trunk while I lit up the hash pipe."

They both get completely sozzled on ether fumes, and head on in. True to its name, the Circus Circus features live trapeze acts above the gambling tables, and a rotating carousel which is also a bar. But the mescaline Dr. Gonzo took earlier finally kicks in with a vengeance, and the two beat a shambolic retreat out of the casino and over to their hotel room. Duke tells his attorney to take a shower and get his head straight, while he steps back out briefly to deal with the car.

"My attorney was in the bathtub when I returned. Submerged in green water -- the oily product of some Japanese bath salts ... He was lost in a fog of green steam; only half his head was visible above the water line."

Observing that Dr. Gonzo has chewed up an entire blotter of acid while he was gone, Duke realizes he's in for a long night. His attorney demands that he crank up the song "White Rabbit" on the portable tape deck that's plugged into the bathroom outlet ("One pill makes you larger / and one pill makes you small ... go ask Alice / when she's ten feet tall").  

"'Green water and the White Rabbit . . . put it on; don't make me use this.' His arm lashed out of the water, the hunting knife gripped in his fist.

'Jesus,' I muttered. And at that point I figured he was beyond help -- lying there in the tub with a head full of acid and the sharpest knife I've ever seen, totally incapable of reason, demanding the White Rabbit."

The situation deteriorates further:

"He seemed on the verge of some awful psychic orgasm . . .

'Let it roll!' he screamed, 'Just as high as the fucker can go! And when it comes to that fantastic note where the rabbit bites its own head off I want you to throw that fuckin radio into the tub with me."

The subsequent action involves large grapefruits and a can of Mace. Eventually Dr. Gonzo is dissuaded from demanding to be electrocuted in the bathtub while listening to "White Rabbit" at top volume.

As that bad craziness dies down and the night wears on, Duke finds himself in a pensive mood, musing on his early experiences with LSD when it was first becoming popular in California.

"San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. ... There was madness in any direction, at any hour. ... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning....

Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...."

He concludes this chapter with a sort of elegy for that moment: "you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Towards the end of the book he returns to this theme, noting how much the drug scene had changed from the mid 60s to the early 70s:

"the popularity of psychedelics has fallen off so drastically that most volume dealers no longer even handle quality acid or mescaline except as a favor to special customers: Mainly jaded, over-thirty drug dilettantes -- like me, and my attorney. The big market, these days, is in Downers."

"'Consciousness Expansion' went out with LBJ . . . and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon."

Hunter S. Thompson was born in 1937. Other people born that year include comedian George Carlin, actor Jack Nicholson and actress Jane Fonda. People born just two years earlier, 1935, include: Oscar "Zeta" Acosta (aka Dr. Gonzo the Samoan attorney), Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and central "acid guru" figure of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)...and Elvis Presley.

These folks all belong to the so-called "Silent Generation," which included as its older members the Beats (such as Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, etc) who were circa 10 to 15 years older than Thompson and, on the younger side, Bob Dylan, the Beatles & the Stones - born in the early '40s, circa five years younger than Thompson. After that, enter the Boomers.

Born between the Beats and the Beatles, the cool kids of Thompson's particular sub-generation were caught up in the general pop culture transition from beatniks to hippies.

By way of comparison: it was mostly the younger Boomers, sometimes identified as the sub-category "Generation Jones," who were the first (late-70s) punk rockers. Members of that group often had as much in common with Gen X as they did with older Boomers. Perhaps it should be unsurprising that many of the most interesting cultural phase shifts correlate with demographic transitions.

As a work of gonzo literature, Fear and Loathing made quite a splash across multiple generations in terms of cultural impact, and influenced some other media as well.

Thompson's fictionalized alter ego "Raoul Duke" directly inspired the character Uncle Duke from the Doonesbury comic strip by Gary Trudeau. Thompson was initially annoyed by the caricature, but later came to view it less negatively.

Where the Buffalo Roam, a 1980 film adaptation of some of Thompson's other writings, starred Bill Murray as the Thompson/Duke character. Many critics, including Thompson himself, thought Murray gave a good performance, but could not salvage the film's badly adapted script.

Eventually, in 1998, after decades of false starts, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was made into a big-budget Hollywood film. Johnny Depp starred as Duke and Benicio Del Toro played his Samoan attorney. Directed by Terry Gilliam, and featuring multiple famous actors in cameos, it received mixed reviews. I enjoyed it, but was a little surprised at how extremely faithful the film was to the book, recreating multiple scenes line for line. It's still effective, given the talented people involved. But with every scene that's scrupulously recreated, the movie loses a bit of that anarchic, improvised feel which is one of the book's great strengths. Perhaps the film might have caught the book's spirit better if it had been a little less faithful to the original text.

Thompson's most famous book prior to F&L was Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, by all accounts a groundbreaking exploration of biker gang culture at its peak, research for which involved him spending a lot of time hanging out with some seriously violent individuals. Not being particularly interested in the Hell’s Angels, I haven't read it. But if that sort of thing interests you it's apparently quite good.

The author Tom Wolfe said it impressed him, and also noticed it

"revealed that he [Thompson] had been present at a party for the Hell's Angels given by Ken Kesey and his hippie -- at the time the term was not 'hippie' but 'acid-head' -- commune, the Merry Pranksters. The party would be a key scene in a book I was writing, (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test). I cold-called Hunter in California, and he generously gave me not only his recollections but also the audiotapes he had recorded at that first famous alliance of the hippies and 'outlaw' motorcycle gangs, a strange and terrible saga in itself".

Wolfe later described F&L as "a scorching epochal sensation."

Fear and Loathing and Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test were exactly the kind of jolt I was looking for as a newly teen boy at the tail end of the 1970s.

Reading them, I felt like I was catching up on what some of the more interesting grownups had been doing while I was too little to understand grownup things. Trying to get up to speed. Filling in the backstory of then-current events and trends which I'd only just begun to find interesting. I started listening to late-60s "acid rock" around the same time (Jefferson Airplane, Doors, early Pink Floyd) for the same reasons. Also, I just liked the music.

And I liked Hunter S. Thompson’s writing a lot. One of his distinctive characteristics as an author is the way his traditionally masculine/macho tendencies get filtered through his anti-establishment attitude and experimental sensibilities.

The testosterone-fueled temptation to find out just how far you can push things leads to some strange places when you're trying to figure out exactly how much absolute over-the-top craziness you can indulge in without getting killed or locked up.

Thompson’s military experience is telling in this regard: he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1955, the year he turned 18. Only three years later, his commanding officer recommended him for an early honorable discharge, writing "...this airman, although talented, will not be guided by policy. Sometimes his rebel and superior attitude seems to rub off on other airmen staff members."

A macho impulse toward one-upmanship or bragging rights is one of the reasons people sometimes consume excessive quantities of drink or drugs. Since at least as far back as Snorri Sturluson’s 13th-century account of Thor engaging in a drinking contest against giants, the ability to drink quantities of alcohol which would fell lesser men has been considered a sign of valor.

Also, the stereotypically male obsession with vehicles and weapons and the specs thereof surfaces repeatedly throughout F&L.

A few examples of this:

• (Handgun) "suddenly he was waving a fat black .357 magnum at me. One of those snubnosed Colt Pythons with the beveled cylinder."

• (Motorcycle) "Vincent Black Shadow" - "two hundred brake-horsepower at four thousand revolutions per minute on a magnesium frame...not much for turning, but it's pure hell on the straightaway"

• (Hunting knife) "he grabbed a grapefruit and sliced it in half with a Gerber mini-magnum -- a stainless-steel hunting knife with a blade like a fresh-honed straight razor.

'Where'd you get that knife?' I asked.

'Room service sent it up,' he said. 'I wanted something to cut the limes.'

'What limes?'

'They didn't have any,' he said. 'They don't grow out here in the desert.' He sliced the grapefruit into quarters . . . then into eighths . . . then sixteenths . . . then he began slashing aimlessly at the residue."

And, of course, every drinking man needs to have opinions about brands of hard liquor. Wild Turkey bourbon whiskey and Bacardi Anejo rum are each specified by name twice. This is definitely not "product placement" - both brands would probably have preferred not to be named in this context. Much tequila is consumed as well, but no brands are specified for that distinctively Mexican spirit.

There's an implicit tension in all this between precision and chaos - a bit of a yin/yang vibe.

For example, at one point Duke decides the car needs higher tire pressure so it will handle the corners better as he speeds around the streets of Las Vegas.

He takes it to a nearby gas station and has the attendant pump all the tires up to fifty PSI (Pounds per Square Inch), but determines this is still insufficient and brings it back for more.

The attendant refuses: "'These tires want twenty-eight in the front and thirty-two in the rear. Hell, fifty's dangerous, but seventy-five is crazy. They'll explode!'"

Duke, insisting these are special experimental tires designed to handle extremely high pressure (a lie he made up on the spot), inflates the tires himself until they're "tighter than snare drums; they felt like teak wood when I tapped on them" and drives off to enjoy the new cornering abilities, while noting that the ride had become "a trifle rough; I could feel every pebble on the highway, like being on roller skates in a gravel pit".

Most people, in some context or other, have felt the desire to test, or push, the Limits: what is even possible? Does it get you somewhere interesting? Toddlers and teenagers around the world are currently conducting investigations, and always will. The young at heart sympathize.

And then there's debauchery as a gesture, as a lifestyle. Striking a rebellious pose, performative wildness. Flipping off respectable society because of all its bullshit. And yeah, sure, who doesn't feel that way sometimes? But too much focus on that makes it all about them. External locus of control is not cool.

What is? Well, in part, "cool" is about a restricted range of emotion: keeping your cool, chill, not flustered. If you can be out of your mind on chemicals yet still manage to function, that's one type of cool. Like being able to hold your liquor.

Getting away with stuff is cool. Flouting rules and laws and any other limits as one pleases - that's got a real transgressive, prankish appeal, like a good heist movie.

The trickster archetype is ancient, eternal - and, like Loki in the Marvel movies, it's not just about "mischief." It's about lawlessness, chaos -- at worst, indifference to the welfare of others. Just typical sociopath behavior? Or is it about trying to live like a legend? Like a force of nature, or at least a natural disaster? To become larger than life. Like one of the funhouse booth options Duke encounters at the Circus Circus casino:

"Stand in front of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just 99¢ your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Ninety-nine cents more for a voice message. 'Say whatever you want, fella. They'll hear you, don't worry about that. Remember you'll be two hundred feet tall.'

Jesus Christ. I could see myself lying in bed in the Mint Hotel, half-asleep and staring idly out the window, when suddenly a vicious nazi drunkard appears two hundred feet tall in the midnight sky, screaming gibberish at the world: 'Woodstock Uber Alles!'

We will close the drapes tonight. A thing like that could send a drug person careening around the room like a ping-pong ball. Hallucinations are bad enough. ... 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."

—

After recovering from his bathtub freakout, Dr. Gonzo orders a set of "fine cowhide luggage" from room service and flies home. Duke checks out of the Mint hotel, planning on rocketing back across the desert to California in the Great Red Shark, but a telegram from Gonzo redirects him to another hotel in downtown Vegas, the Flamingo, where our dauntless Samoan has rented a room so he and Duke can attend the National District Attorney’s Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Rolling Stone magazine wants Duke to write an article about it.

Duke's take on this: "If the Pigs were gathering in Vegas for a top-level Drug Conference, we felt the drug culture should be represented."

F&L is divided into two parts, and this is where the second half starts. In real life, it was the second of two separate trips to Vegas by Thompson and Acosta; the book conflates them into one extended rampage.

When Duke checks into the new room at the Flamingo, he is unpleasantly startled to find Dr. Gonzo already there, with a young woman / teen girl called Lucy, as in "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," whom he met on the plane. Lucy has run away from her home in northern Montana, bringing along many of the portraits of Barbara Streisand which she has painted. Both Lucy and Dr. Gonzo are tripping on acid: he gave her some on the plane. When Duke walks in, his Samoan attorney is stark naked, and Lucy is wearing only a "shapeless blue smock."

Sex is mostly just a passing thought in F&L. Dr. Gonzo's ill-advised entanglement with Lucy is the only time sex has a real impact on the narrative.

Out of Lucy's earshot, Duke explains to him

"'Just picture yourself telling a jury that you tried to help this poor girl by giving her LSD and then taking her out to Vegas for one of your special stark-naked back rubs.'

He shook his head sadly. 'You're right. They'd probably burn me at the goddamn stake .... Shit, it doesn't pay to try to help somebody these days.'”

They pack her off, still in a druggy daze, to another hotel on some pretext, but she has regained enough clarity to remember their hotel number, and calls the room. This leads to a frenzied performance over the telephone by Dr. Gonzo:

"'O MY GOD! THEY'RE KICKING THE DOOR DOWN!' He hurled the phone down and began shouting: 'No! Get away from me! I'm innocent! It was Duke! I swear to God!' He kicked the phone against the wall, then leaned down to it and began yelling again: 'No, I don't know where she is! I think she went back to Montana. You'll never catch Lucy! She's gone!' He kicked the receiver again, then picked it up and held it about a foot away from his mouth as he uttered a long, quavering groan. 'No! No! Don't put that thing on me!" he screamed. Then he slammed the phone down.

... the room was quiet again. He was back in his chair, watching Mission Impossible and fumbling idly with the hash pipe. It was empty. 'Where's that opium?" he asked."

This leads to the adrenochrome scene.

The real-life chemical compound known as adrenochrome was once hypothesized to play a significant role in the onset of schizophrenia. This led the early psychedelic pioneer Aldous Huxley to speculate that it might also be able to function as a psychoactive drug. Despite not panning out on either front (medical or recreational), adrenochrome's reputation has not been hindered by its obscurity and lack of efficacy.

In this scene from F&L, Thompson fictionalizes it as an insanely powerful drug which can only be sourced from "the adrenaline glands from a living human body ... It's no good if you get it out of a corpse." This was pure gonzo bullshit on his part, but it worked as part of the story, where his 300-lb. Samoan attorney happens to possess a vial of pure adrenochrome which he apparently accepted as payment from a Satanist client accused of child abuse. Raoul Duke samples a tiny amount and regrets it: "my tongue felt like burning magnesium ... Total paralysis now. Every muscle in my body was contracted. I couldn't even move my eyeballs, much less turn my head or talk."

80s goth band the Sisters of Mercy wrote a song called "Adrenochrome," almost certainly inspired by this depiction in F&L.

Amusingly enough, the "QAnon" internet conspiracy theorists of the early 21st century mistook these tall tales about fictional drug abuse for Actual Facts about cabals of international Satanic ritual-murdering child-molesting cannibalistic drug fiends, and revived the nearly-forgotten "adrenochrome, unethically sourced drug of abuse" as a purportedly factual vice of the boogeymen they love to fear and loathe.

Having recovered from the adrenochrome, the next day Duke and Gonzo attend the opening session of the National District Attorney’s Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in the main ballroom of the Dunes Hotel.

"We all wore name tags. ... Mine said I was a 'private investigator' from L.A -- which was true, in a sense; and my attorney's name-tag identified him as an expert in "Criminal Drug Analysis." Which was also true, in a sense."

"Here were more than a thousand top-level cops telling each other 'we must come to terms with the drug culture,' but they had no idea where to start. They couldn't even find the goddamn thing. There were rumors in the hallways that maybe the Mafia was behind it. Or perhaps the Beatles."

After noting that some of the people in attendance were surprisingly stylish in an undercover super-Mod way, he continues:

"for every urban-hipster, there were about twenty crude-looking rednecks who could have passed for assistant football coaches at Mississippi State.

These were the people who made my attorney nervous. Like most Californians, he was shocked to actually see these people from The Outback. Here was the cop-cream from Middle America . . . and, Jesus, they looked and talked like a gang of drunken pig farmers!

I tried to console him. 'They're actually nice people,' I said, 'once you get to know them.'

He smiled: 'Know them? Are you kidding? Man, I know these people in my goddamn blood!'

'Don't mention that word around here,' I said. 'You'll get them excited.'"

The speakers at the drug conference are mercilessly caricatured as "second-rate academic hustlers" comically out of touch with real drug culture and peddling nonsense to gullible cops.

Although Duke finds it "easy enough to sit there with a head full of mescaline and listen to hour after hour of irrelevant gibberish" his attorney is less content.

"'I'll be down in the casino,' he said. 'I know a hell of a lot better ways to waste my time than listening to this bullshit.'"

Duke soon follows and they leave the conference behind, heading out for more drug-fueled adventures amid the seedy charms of Las Vegas.

—

By the end of the trip, they have comprehensively demolished their hotel room.

"The general back-alley ambience of the suite was so rotten, so incredibly foul, that I figured I could probably get away with claiming it was some kind of 'Life-slice exhibit' that we'd brought down from Haight Street, to show cops from other parts of the country how deep into filth and degeneracy the drug people will sink, if left to their own devices."

And one morning they have an unfortunate encounter with Alice from Linen Service.

"We'd forgotten to hang out the 'Do Not Disturb' sign . . . so she wandered into the room and startled my attorney, who was kneeling, stark naked, in the closet, vomiting into his shoes. ...

'She was holding that mop like an axe-handle,' he said later. 'So I came out of the closet in a kind of running crouch, still vomiting, and hit her right at the knees . . . it was pure instinct; I thought she was ready to kill me"

Duke wakes up when he hears her scream: "I was out of bed in a flash, grabbing my wallet and waving the gold Policemen's Benevolent Assn. press badge in front of her face.

'You're under arrest!" I shouted.

'No!' she groaned. 'I just wanted to clean up!'

My attorney got to his feet, breathing heavily. 'She must have used a pass key,' he said. 'I was polishing my shoes in the closet when I noticed her sneaking in'"

Fortunately for Duke and Gonzo, Alice believes them to be cops. So they improvise a story about how they're investigating a drug ring at the hotel, and recruit her to be an informant. She agrees - "I'll help you all you need! I hate dope!" - apologizes for disturbing them and leaves, smiling, as Dr. Gonzo says to her "Thank God for the decent people."

The beginning of the end of this whole demented adventure is a mad drive onto an airport runway to get Dr. Gonzo onto his flight home.

Running late, and having missed a crucial turn, Duke resorts to driving their huge convertible across

"the grassy moat between the two freeway lanes. The ditch was too deep for a head-on run, so I took it at an angle. ... we careened up the opposite bank and into the oncoming lane ... bounced on the freeway and kept right on going into the cactus field on the other side. I recall running over a fence of some kind and dragging it a few hundred yards, but by the time we got to the runway we were fully under control"

"No sign of alarm or pursuit. I wondered if maybe this kind of thing happened all the time in Vegas -- cars full of late-arriving passengers screeching desperately across the runway, dropping off wild-eyed Samoans clutching mysterious canvas bags who would sprint onto planes at the last possible second and then roar off into the sunrise."

Duke and Gonzo's goodbyes consist of a quick in-joke about a poem Hunter S. Thompson once published in a student-run countercultural magazine in 1965. His attorney's assessment of the poem is "'probably good advice, if you have shit for brains.'"

So, as for my assessment of this book: would I recommend it? To certain types of people, yes: it's not for everybody.

As Thompson said on a few occasions, "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."

Depending on your sense of morality, narrators with few discernible goals beyond narcissistic hedonism may rub you the wrong way. F&L is a lot more fun to read than On the Road, but they overlap somewhat in their emphasis on freedom - freedom from the constraints of society's typical tiresome bullshit, to be sure, but also something like freedom from any sense of responsibility to anyone, for anything.

Is this mere sociopathy? Valorizing freedom and adventure "uber alles" might be your best move some days, but it necessarily puts every other desirable goal and virtue on the backburner at best - not something most folks would recommend, long term.

When I read On the Road, in college, I mainly found it boring, rather than noticing just how terrible the protagonists' behavior was. (Which Scott, rightfully, calls out in his review).

And when I read Huckleberry Finn, back in grade school, Huck's abusive dad didn't really phase me: he was just a bad guy. Revisiting that book more recently, it bothered me considerably more how Huck's dad kidnaps him, keeps him prisoner in a cabin in the woods, threatens him with a firearm, and repeatedly beats him black and blue. Some pretty severe child abuse there: no wonder Huck sympathized with Jim's desire to escape slavery.

Likewise, the first time I read F&L I didn't notice just how much inappropriate brandishing of handguns and hunting knives Dr. Gonzo is guilty of. He comes off as more of a jerk than I had noticed the first time I read it, when I pictured him like a Yosemite Sam type, just talking trash and pretending to shoot everything.

Which, in a roundabout way, speaks to the question of whether such books are a Bad Influence. If the stuff you'd never do anyway doesn't even really sink in the first time you read it, how bad of an influence has it been?

Notably, despite all the highly questionable choices with potential for disastrous consequences, the actual bad behavior in F&L (aside from violating every drug law ever enacted) amounts mainly to property damage, traffic violations, and skipping out on bills - there's even some minor effort to look out for Lucy's welfare (though primarily to avoid getting busted).

And part of the appeal of this kind of story is that readers want to be shocked and titillated - the romance of the outlaw.

"Maybe do a bit of serious drag-racing on the Strip," Duke thinks at one point. "Pull up to that big stoplight in front of the Flamingo and start screaming at the traffic: 'Alright, you chickenshit wimps! You pansies! When this goddamn light flips green, I'm gonna stomp down on this thing and blow every one of you gutless punks off the road!' ... How often does a chance like that come around? To jangle the bastards right down to the core of their spleens."

The one brief "drag-race" they actually get into is even more lurid than that:

"I stomped on the accelerator and stayed right next to them for about two hundred yards, watching for cops in the mirror while my attorney kept screaming at them: "Shoot! Fuck! Scag! Blood! Heroin! Rape! Cheap! Communist! Jab it right into your fucking eyeballs!"

I enjoyed F&L as a young teen and enjoyed it again, more than four decades later, while re-reading it to write this review. It's got the pacing of an adventure story. Can't honestly describe it as a good influence, but how much it actually influenced me vs. how much "I was already the type who goes looking for that sort of thing" is debatable.

This book may have ... inspired? encouraged? me to go down some metaphorical (and a few literal) dark alleys I might not otherwise have sniffed out - for better and worse. Had some stupid/fun adventures. Played in various bands in clubs and bars, there were some over-the-top parties, some colorful road trips.... "But you grow up and you calm down" as the Clash said ("Clampdown" London Calling). Once the novelty wears off, that feeling of breaking on through to the other side becomes less revelatory.

Was it worth it? Would I go back and do it all again? With 20/20 hindsight: "yes, but...."

It was important, maybe necessary, for me to become the kind of person who has done such things, who took the chance, to be the type who might - even if, paradoxically, most of those particular things eventually proved less important than they seemed.

I'll always love the feeling of disorientation, though! You can get it from amusement park rides, in dreams, through drink, and drugs...as a little kid I used to spin around in circles until I was too dizzy to walk straight, just for fun. And that's another part of the appeal of a story like this: it's all about turning regular life into a crazy adventure. If you can't find the secret door that lets you into Narnia, you can at least enjoy some strangely altered realities in this world for a while.

A couple of well-worn quotes from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by historic British visionary William Blake seem relevant here:

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite."

Perhaps William Blake bears more responsibility than is generally recognized for the ascendance of "sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll" as a philosophy worthy of devotion.

In 1953, English author Aldous Huxley used the second quote for the title and epigraph of his autobiographical account of experiences with mescaline.

60s rock icon Jim Morrison of the Doors was fond of these sayings, and of Blake and Huxley in general - his band's name was a reference to the same quote Huxley used. Morrison was also influenced by Kerouac's On the Road, and famously died somewhere along the road of excess at age 27, most likely prior to reaching the palace of wisdom. He died in 1971, the year F&L came out. There's a whole pantheon of hedonistic rock gods who die at age 27, ranging from seminal figures like Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin, all the way to latter-day members of the "27 Club" like Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.

Kurt Cobain would've been a year behind me in school. Unlike Nirvana, none of the garage bands I played in got famous, but I still felt a certain kinship with that guy and similar, less well-known, musicians. Older Gen-X types like us who started bands in the late 80s/early 90s often took some inspiration from the wilder, crazier, more experimental side of late 60s/early 70s music and culture. I wasn't the only guy around who had read Fear and Loathing. It's no surprise the grungy Seattle bands sounded like they were trying to resurrect Zeppelin and Sabbath. There was a lot of nostalgia for the classic visions of drug-addled rock'n'roll debauchery we grew up with.

Around '91, at some little hipster clothing store in Boston, I bought a (bootleg) Fear and Loathing t-shirt: an all-over print of Ralph Steadman's illustrations silk-screened in black and acid green on a hand-bleached background. Got a lot of compliments on that shirt. The book had attained iconic status by then, ensconced in the Pantheon of Cool two decades after it came out.

Now it’s five decades later, and we’re as far from 1971 as '71 was from 1919. There’s a fancy commemorative hardcover edition of F&L available. Some of the casinos Duke and Gonzo careened through are still standing, others are gone. Drug trends have varied a bit over the last half-century - no one was talking about microdosing or fentanyl in the seventies - but I suppose there will always be a fair amount of drinking and recreational drug use associated with casinos and with artistically inclined people like writers and musicians. There has been since the late 19th century at least. Gamblers are risk-takers by definition, and artsy types tend to be more edgy and experimental than the general public, in part due to temperament and in part, perhaps, to keep up appearances: cultivating distinctive vices is an easy way to distinguish oneself from the insufficiently bohemian masses.

Of course, an incautious interest in intoxicants comes with downsides too obvious to bear belaboring. People die or wreck their lives all the time due to drink or drugs.

As for psychedelic enlightenment, don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it. But at the end of the day, how helpful is it to cleanly perceive William Blake's infinity in everything? The one infinity we can all easily see is the blackness between the stars.

Kurt Cobain, after struggling with heroin addiction for years, died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, age 27 in '94.

Hunter S. Thompson did not die at 27. He died forty years later, age 67 in 2005 - from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. Whether he had reached the palace of wisdom by then is a matter of speculation, or opinion. He had certainly traveled the road of excess for many years.

In accordance with his wishes, his cremated remains were packed into fireworks and shot out of a cannon which was perched atop a colossal 15-story tower constructed in the shape of his "gonzo fist" logo (a fist with two thumbs clenching a peyote button.) The expensive ceremony, hosted by Thompson's widow, and son, was funded by actor Johnny Depp, who had befriended Thompson in the course of portraying him in the movie version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Insouciantly garish and loud, these over-the-top funeral proceedings marked an incontestably appropriate end to Hunter S. Thompson's storied career.

—

The book Fear and Loathing ends with our protagonist strung out on amphetamines, paranoid on an airplane and popping amyl nitrates. But Raoul Duke does succeed in his quest, his Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream!

As the tale wraps up, Duke returns to the flamboyant charms of the Circus Circus casino to meet his friend Bruce at the bar. Bruce (a thinly veiled version of Canadian musician Bruce Innes) has a steady gig with his band at the casino, and has been trying to help our protagonist illicitly purchase an ape. This ape deal falls through - after the beast viciously attacks another bar patron - and our narrator prepares to leave Las Vegas.

"'When are you taking off?' Bruce asked.

'As soon as possible,' I said. 'No point hanging around this town any longer. I have all I need. Anything else would only confuse me.'

He seemed surprised. 'You found the American Dream?' he said. 'In this town?'

I nodded. 'We're sitting on the main nerve right now,' I said. 'You remember that story the manager told us about the owner of this place? How he always wanted to run away and join the circus when he was a kid?'

Bruce ordered two more beers. He looked over the casino for a moment, then shrugged. 'Yeah, I see what you mean,' he said. 'Now the bastard has his own circus, and a license to steal, too.'"