From his introduction to a new edition of Fear and Loathing in America, by Hunter S. Thompson, which was published this spring by Simon & Schuster.
In 1971, when I was fourteen, I read Hunter S. Thompson’s book Hell’s Angels, published just a few years earlier. It struck a special chord in me. His account of life with the notorious motorcycle gang opened my eyes to an as yet untamed slice of contemporary American society, an outlaw culture scaring the daylights out of the God-fearing, law-abiding citizens of suburban and small-town U.S.A. What’s more, Hunter S. Thompson had joined in the fun, and it didn’t feel like he was adopting a pose. He was a reporter with an eye for the street and a clear, take-no-prisoners way with words. He blew open the perceptions of my generation in a way that no one else did.
The Flower Power years had crashed and burned by then. Thompson had watched them go and turned his attention to their messy, ongoing aftermath. That, as it turned out, offered some insight into what I found happening around me. While I was in the ninth grade in northern Virginia, Vietnam vets were returning to schools so they could graduate. A dozen or so came to mine, and with them came heroin and violence. One group of vets mugged kids in the hallways and bathrooms and extorted others for money, while another group, a bit older, roared around the area in an army-surplus Jeep. They had guns and dealt smack and soon had a couple of the high school girls strung out and working for them as prostitutes. The school administrators and our parents were clueless; as teenagers, we were left to fend for ourselves.
I started carrying a switchblade, dropped acid, and had sex, sometimes in groups, at night in the woods near the suburban homes where our parents waited for us with meat loaf and iced tea. One of the strung-out girls was found strangled to death near her home at seventeen; a boy I knew dropped acid and never came back from the trip; two others I knew, both sixteen, OD’d and died, one on speed, the other on smack; the guys in the Jeep raided a warehouse with dynamite and began selling it; a junkie in nearby Washington offered his services as a hit man for fifty dollars a pop. The guardrails were gone; we moved to England.
A few years later, in my late teens, I was back in the States, and I hitchhiked across America several times. Hunter S. Thompson’s America was still very much there.
Once, in Kentucky, I got a ride from a guy driving a Mustang convertible. He looked like a fourteen-year-old runaway who’d stolen a car, and then looking closer I saw he had wrinkles. I soon found out he was a jockey, in his early thirties, with a pituitary-gland issue. He had taken to the road because he had come home to find his girlfriend in bed with another man, and decided to leave everything behind. It had just happened, and he wasn’t sure what he was going to do next.
Riding on a back road with a black man across the North Carolina state line, I came to a small town with a billboard that read: welcome to kkk country: help stamp out communism and integration. Noting my shocked expression, the man driving said in a quiet voice, “Welcome to North Carolina.”
While heading south to Florida from New York, a boxer from Argentina told me about his life in the ring. When I expressed an interest in taking up the gloves myself, he had me feel his nose, whose bone had been surgically removed. He encouraged me to go to Iceland instead, where he had just spent six months living with a fifteen-year-old girl and being waited on by her mother: “Iceland is great for fucking,” he repeated like an oath, in between reminders that I shouldn’t become a boxer.
And there was the time I got a driveaway Mercedes with a guy I vaguely knew, who pushed dope downtown in New York, and he agreed to help me drive it from New York to San Francisco. We had six days to get it there, but we made it in sixty-five hours. While one of us drove, the other napped. I kept to around seventy-five miles an hour, and assumed he did, too, but he somehow always advanced farther than I did. It wasn’t till the second day, somewhere in the Midwest, that I realized why. Waking up in the back seat because the car was shimmying, I saw the speedometer; he was doing one hundred and ten miles per hour. He had been doing coke the whole way across the country.
When we reached San Francisco, my cokehead friend asked me to let him off along the freeway next to a strip joint. It was daybreak. I left him there, never to see him again, and returned the car to Mercedes-Benz somewhere south of the city. Across the Bay, I could just make out the silhouette of Oakland, home of the Hells Angels.
