Hunter S. Thompson’s ode to debauchery in Las Vegas has, I’m sure, inspired many a road trip, trying to emulate the drug-fueled mayhem he encountered.
But how many of those road trips tried to tease out the threads of reality from HST’s psychedelic haze? At least one, it turns out. On the five-year anniversary of Thompson’s death, a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal runs down the trail — and, surprisingly, it hasn’t all gone cold:
Some events are verifiable. In the 2008 documentary “Gonzo,” Thompson and Acosta can actually be heard living Chapter 9 as they pull into a Boulder City taco stand.
“We’re looking for the American dream,” Acosta tells a waitress, “and we were told it was somewhere in this area.”
The waitress turns to the cook, thinking she has just been asked directions to a nightclub.
“Hey Lou,” she says, “you know where the American Dream is?”
“That whole chapter is a transcription of that audiotape,” said “Gonzo” director Alex Gibney. “So it leads you to believe that some of this stuff is real.”
Other events — not so much. The reporter, Corey Levitan, manages to speak with some long-retired people who would have been in a position to encounter the worst depravities of ‘Fear and Loathing.’
“That is something I would have known,” [a hotel manager] said, “but I never heard that.”
Of course, in a book like this, truth may be in the eye of the beholder. One of the messages you can take away from Thompson’s style of “gonzo” journalism is that since true journalistic objectivity is impossible, perhaps accuracy doesn’t much matter either — not if you’re looking for the truth, at least.
Grant Hamilton
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Colin
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