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Hunter S. Thompson: a Ritual Reenactment of Deviant Behavior

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Hunter S. Thompson: a Ritual Reenactment of Deviant Behavior Connecticut o BRtl92-138 State • - r University P.O. Box 2008, New Britain, Connecticut 06050 Central .• Eastern .•. Southern •. Western Phone: (203) 827-7700 Fax: (203) 827-7406 RESOLtJrION granting PERMISSION 'IO REPRINI' COPYRIGHTED ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN CONNECTlcur REVIEW December 4, 1992 RESOLVED, That the Board of Trustees of the Connecticut State University hereby grants pemission to Dr. Janes N. Stull to reprint the article by him, entitled "Hunter S. Thanpson: A Ritual ReenaC'tlrent of Deviant Behavior," published in Connecticut Review, Vol. XIII, • No.1, Spring 1991. A Certified True Copy: ~-, President • An Equal Opportunity Employer • Hunter S. Thompson: A Ritual Reenactment of Deviant Behavior JAMES N. STULL Hunter S. Thompson grew up in "the stifling small-town atmosphere of Louisville, KentuckY:' 1 His father was an insurance agent whose only amusement was going out to the track early in the morning to time the horses. As a teenager Thompson "rebelled;' according to Timothy Crouse, by "knocking off' liquor stores and gas stations.2 In one three-day period, Thompson and two friends robbed the same gas station three times. Thompson recalls standing by his apartment window - which overlooked the gas sta­ tion - and watching the police investigate the burglaries while he and his friends drank beer. Thompson was also an accomplished shoplifter; he would go empty-handed, he explained, into a jewelry store and leave with a half dozen watches. Though Thompson was never arrested, Louisville authorities "managed to put him in jail for thirty days on a phony rape charge:'3 He was eighteen at the time, and very frightened by his brief period of incarceration. Though Thompson swore off a life of petty crime and decided to devote his life to writing, the articulation of a criminal (deviant) self, both real and metaphoric, would later become the cornerstone of his literary nonfiction. Shortly after his release from jail, Thompson enlisted in the Air Force and became a sportswriter for the base newspaper. He was also writing for a number of civilian papers under the pen names of "Sebastian Owl" and "Thorne Stockton:' When this was dis­ covered, he was fired from the base newspaper and threatened with duty in Iceland. • Because of Thompson's general inability to conform to Air Force life, he was discharged two years before his enlistment expired. At the time, Colonel Evans, of the Office of Information Services, made this assessment of Thompson: This Airman, although talented, will not be guided by policy or personal advice and guidance. Sometimes his rebel and superior attitude seems to rub off on other airmen staff members. He has little consideration for military bearing or dress and seems to dislike the service and want[s] out as soon as possible.4 Over the next two years, a series of similar dismissals occurred. Thompson was fired from three writing jobs: in Pennsylvania for wrecking his editor's car; in Middletown, New York for insulting an advertiser and kicking "a candy machine to death"; and at Time for his bad attitude.s Between 1959 and 1963, he worked in South Africa and the Caribbean as a journalist for the National Observer (and on occasion for the New 10rk Herald Tribune). While this writing is generally more conventional than his later work, Thompson nonetheless reveals his liberal, if not radical, political beliefs and underscores his social marginality through an identification with disenfranchised others. When Department of English, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011 Copyright\!:> 1991 Board of Trustees, Connecticut State University • 87 Connecticut Review Spring 1991 Stull Thompson found himself spending too much time rolling dice at the Domino Club, a • club for foreign correspondents, he decided it was time to return to the United States. His departure from the National Observer was eventually precipitated by a disagreement with editors over coverage of the Free Speech Movement. For a time, Thompson worked on a novel and lived in an apartment in San Fran­ cisco with his wife, Sandy. In that same year, 1964, Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation, asked him if he would do an article on the Hell's Angels for $100. Thompson accepted, recalling later that the fee was enough to cover the following month's rent. The article was eventually expanded, of course, into Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, in which Thompson wrote sympathetically about, and even identified with, the notorious "outlaw" motorcycle gang. III the ensuing three years, Thompson wrote for Pageant, The Distant Drummer, and Scanlan's Monthly, and later ran for Sheriff of Aspen County on the Freak Power Ticket. Thompson's tentative platform included plans to rip up city streets and replace them with sod and to restrict fishing and hunting to Aspen residents. Thompson also promised to limit his use of LSD to non-working hours. (He lost by only six votes.) In 1970 he began his association with ]ann Wenner, Editor and Publisher of Rolling Stone magazine. The relationship proved to be a mutually beneficial one. The freshness and new energy Wenner was looking for, following his 1970 purge of editors and writers, was provided by Thompson. In turn, Wenner gave Thompson the creative latitude needed to develop the "Gonzo" style that now characterizes such works as Fear and Loathing in Las vegas and The Curse o/Lono. Thompson became National Affairs Editor at Roll­ ing Stone in 1970, and held the position until 1974. He continued his relationship with the magazine into the early 1980's. In more recent years, Thompson has worked in a • massage parlor (doing research) and contributed a weekly column to the San Francisco Examiner. In this brief biographical sketch, we can see that Thompson's "criminal" past, his early dismissal from the Air Force, as well as other problems he had keeping writing jobs, point more generally to his repudiation of authority and his refusal to conform to the behavioral dictates of a socially defined role, whether itbe citizen of Louisville, enlisted airman, or journalist. Thompson is all too willing to identify himself in opposition to virtually any cultural norm - as an "outlaw" or "deviant" - and make a public record of his felonious past: "I took that fatal dive off the straight and narrow path so long ago that I can't remember when I first become [sic] a felon - but I have been one ever since, and it's way too late to change now. In the eyes of The Law, my whole life has been one long and sinful felony:'6 Although Thompson's "outlaw" status seems as much chosen as conferred, it is also, as this passage suggests, a confirmation of the title ascribed to him by the normative culture. As Erving Goffman points out, the deviant can never quite escape from his past: "What often results is not the acquisition of fully normal status, but a transformation of self from someone with a particular blemish into someone with a record of having corrected a particular blemish:'7 Though Thompson has largely put an end to his criminal past, he still defines himself throughout his nonfiction as what he once was: a felon (i.e., outlaw, deviant). Therefore, we must first begin to interpret Thompson's work through this initial metaphor of the self, for his writings repeatedly dramatize his adversarial relationship to mainstream culture. • 88 Connecticut Review Spring 1991 Stull More specifically, in a number of works Thompson describes himself ambiguously as a fugitive on the lam, running from some undefined or questionably real authority. • His flight is fueled by a paranoia that is both real and comically imagined, by a feeling of persecution that is dramatized and exaggerated for literary purposes. Thompson's story, as we shall see, is one of personal breakdown and recovery. Because he moves between the secluded and private world of his Woody Creek, Colorado home (and other symbolic sanctuaries) and the larger world outside, it is essential that we seen his oeuvre not as a collection of individual works but as one ongoing saga of emergence and renewal, as a ritual enactment of deviant behavior in which the dynamic relation between putative outsider and the normative culture is chronicled and explored during a period of social crisis and change. In the following pages I will reconstruct the essential pieces of this personal, literary and cultural story. To start with, Thompson's journalistic assignments might be rightfully understood as journeys that begin with the departure from the real and symbolic sanctuary of his Woody Creek home. Early in The Curse ofLono, Thompson explains to the reader, by way of a letter to illustrator Ralph Steadman, that "the time has come to kick ass, Ralph, even if it means coming briefly out of retirement and dealing, once again, with the public. I am also in need of a rest - for legal reasons - so I want this gig to be easy:'8 (He is assigned to cover the Honolulu Marathon for Running magazine.) Thompson's "gigs" Uournalism assignments) are never easy, however, and in fact they are potentially dangerous, as he suggests in the opening pages of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72. Thompson leaves the "pastoral" and private retreat of Woody Creek and then comments on the public world of.Washington, D.C.: "Life runs fast & mean in this town;' he explains. "It's like living in an armed camp, a condition of constant fear:'9 Thomp­ son's trepidation reveals (on a personal level) a dislike of socially defined and densely • populated space and simultaneously establishes (on rhetorical and cultural levels) the central conflict of his writing: the deviant (outsider) confronting a brutal and at times punitive mainstream culture.
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