Hunter S. Thompson—gonzo writer, sperm donor for the New Journalism (Tom Wolfe was just the midwife), great admirer of drugs, drink, and guns—killed himself last year. His frequent collaborator Ralph Steadman, whose wonderfully ink-sprayed drawings accompanied many of Thompson’s books and articles, has clearly been mulling over their friendship and has now published a most peculiar reminiscence. The Joke’s Over: Bruised Memories of Gonzo: Hunter S. Thompson and Me (Harcourt, $32.95) is a memorial to Dr. Gonzo but maybe more, too: a way to get over the “rabid, downright wretched, cheating, low-down sonofabitch”.
Speaking from the studio behind his house in southeast England, Steadman is unrepentant about describing Thompson that way. “I thought he’d appreciate it,” Steadman says with a charming English/Welsh accent. His is a shambling, brandy-scented conversational style. He starts with Voltaire (“I was just thinking of a Voltaire thing the other day: ‘Those who can make you believe absurdity can make you commit atrocity.’ Which is exactly what’s happened in Iraq”) and free-associates like someone who saw the ’70s firsthand.
Steadman’s time with Thompson began at the Kentucky Derby, when the two were dispatched by the now-defunct Scanlan’s to cover the event. Thompson’s mad, you-are-here scratchings became an entirely new style of reportage. (Read the original at derbypost.com/hunter.html.) “He had one of those reporter’s wire-
spiral notebooks,” Steadman recalls now. “He was always using them. He did the whole of the Kentucky Derby with red ink. Always red ink. That was his way. And he wrote notes, short staccato notes about what he was seeing. He was trying to get that William Faulkner idea of ‘on the hoof, reporting as you go, as you’re doing it, the feeling of it—I’m in it, right. I’m writing about being in it. The best journalism is fiction anyway, so there you go.’ That’s how it came about.”
Meanwhile, Steadman “was doing the same thing, but he [Thompson] said, ‘They’re filthy drawings. Filthy habit, Ralph. Kind of a filthy habit.’?” Their relationship was never simple. “It was slightly volatile,” Steadman allows. “Okay, it was very volatile, really. When I went over there [to America in 1970], I went over with the idea that we were going to do a bit of sparring.…I was visually sparring and he was verbally sparring.” Sometimes their ensuing battles—often conducted by fax—were serious, sometimes not. “He thought I was pompous when he first met me.…He left me sometimes feeling pretty bruised and battered by things.”
But maybe Thompson’s erratic behaviour and mood swings had more to do with the endless party favours? “That’s partly it—what you might say, ‘a cocaine personality’, you know. Bound to be. The thing is, the enormous amount of whisky and booze he drank was colossal. I couldn’t keep up with it.”
So what is Steadman left with? A steady career—he does wine labels as well as a trade in fine art and Thompson memorabilia through his Web site—and a sense of being out-of-step with a post-gonzo world. “The last two generations are taking themselves far too seriously,” Steadman concludes. “I’m afraid they’re not going to make it if they go on like this. I really think that no drink, no smoking, no—oh, I don’t know. Prissily looking after themselves with all sorts of essential oils and Christ knows what else. It’s just a bit too fucking much for me.”
Our conversation wanders for another 20 minutes, but really, everything is in the book and in the art. Then, before we hang up, he rouses himself: “Just one thing of wisdom is—I love it. It’s Napoleon’s and it is: ‘Never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake.’ Isn’t that good? Clever bloke, Napoleon. That’s a sort of final thought on things. A final flourish. Ha ha ha!”?