This is our country, too, and we can goddam well control it if
we learn to use the tools.
—HST, 1969
Gonzo: Perhaps derived from the French Canadian gonzeaux. The word had a couple of different meanings, but Bill Cardoso used it in the Boston-bar derivation, referring to the last man standing after a night of drinking. Gonzo had a nice ring. Plus, there was an old James Booker organ instrumental out of New Orleans that Hunter used to pick up on WWL late at night. “Gonzo” had been a regional hit and Hunter had liked the demented, loopy tune from the first time he heard it.
Back in Woody Creek, Hunter had brooded over his failure. “The article is useless,” he wrote to Ralph Steadman, though he congratulated himself for exciting flashes of style and tone. But then the praise began coming in from readers, and he reconsidered. “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” provided Hunter his epiphany. When it was published, he remembered “massive numbers” of phone calls, letters, and well-wishes, all saying it was some kind of next step in the evolution of journalism. Hunter, who had his tail between his legs, was stunned.
“I thought, ‘Holy shit, if I can write like this and get away with it, why should I keep trying to write like the New York Times?’ It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.”
Getting away with it: one of the central themes of his childhood. Because of his natural charm, wit, and charisma, he had coasted through so many of his childhood troubles. Now he realized he didn’t have to reach back and pull out the Dow Jones polish or refrain from stepping into the story. He could write about the slings and arrows of being Hunter, and people would buy it.
Though his name did not yet tumble off the lips of American suburbanites, he did arouse the world of journalism. Scanlan’s was not ubiquitous, like Life or Time, but it was on the coffee tables of the hip, and Hunter Thompson was drawing notice as the newest of the new journalists. After Tom Wolfe had made his splash in the early sixties, others had followed—including bona fide literati, such as Truman Capote and Norman Mailer. Though Wolfe’s nose curled when he heard the phrase “New Journalism,” there was no denying that’s what everyone called it.
But Hunter stayed apart from the new journalists and tilled his Gonzo sharecropper’s claim, working at a parcel separate from the other new journalists. He drew a distinct line of demarcation between himself and . . . those other guys.
“Unlike Tom Wolfe or Gay Talese, for instance, I almost never try to reconstruct a story,” Hunter said. “They’re both much better reporters than I am, but then I don’t really think of myself as a reporter. Gonzo is just a word I picked up because I liked the sound of it—which is not to say there isn’t a basic difference between the kind of writing I do and the Wolfe/Talese style. They tend to go back and re-create stories that have already happened, while I like to get right in the middle of whatever I’m writing about—as personally involved as possible.”
Hunter was smart enough to see that Scanlan’s would not last. He knew that the bicoastal operation and Hinckle’s and Zion’s spendthrift ways were crippling the magazine. Hunter tried to advise Hinckle about over-the-top mismanagement.
But as long as they paid, Hunter was willing to work for Scanlan’s. Hinckle sensed he had stumbled into a great partnership by putting Hunter together with Ralph. Hunter agreed and was bowled over when a friend suggested the team begin a series called the Thompson-Steadman Report, something that would routinely debunk America’s most cherished institutions. It was a brilliant and simple concept, he told Hinckle: the two of them would travel the country “and shit on everything,” writing “venomous bullshit” about America and all of its most cherished institutions. The Kentucky Derby was just the start. Mardi Gras . . . the Master’s . . . the Super Bowl . . . New Year’s Eve in Times Square. . . . Hunter ticked off a huge list for Ralph, trying to sell him on the idea. Witness all these events, “rape them all, quite systematically,” then package as a book on the American Dream, defiled. It might allow Hunter to kill two birds with one stone. He called it a “king-bitch dog-fucker of an idea.”
Hunter was exploding with let’s-shit-on-everything ideas when he should have been cranking up for the sheriff’s race that fall. Hunter called in reinforcements—brother Jim had come for the second summer in a row and was keeping Sandy and Juan company. Hunter had not commented on Jim’s coming-out letter, but by his invitation showed that he accepted his brother’s sexuality. He also needed Jim’s help with his campaign. Hunter was sincere about his political ambitions. “I wanted to control my environment,” he said.
Finally, in midsummer, Hunter and Ralph compared calendars to see what event they could cover. Ralph suggested the America’s Cup yacht race, set for mid-September. Hunter figured he could afford a vacation from his campaign to go watch some sailboats.
In the meantime, Hunter was already overdue for his first Rolling Stone assignment, his promised self-blow job on the sheriff’s campaign. The idea was to have the piece in print by July, to mobilize an army of freaks to descend on Aspen to get out the vote and scare the hell out of the good citizens. But the story wasn’t happening; Hunter was too excited by his reporting breakthrough to concentrate yet on his campaign.
When Ralph returned to the States, he and Hunter set off for Newport, Rhode Island, in the waning days of the summer. What followed was a pointless and mostly nauseated week aboard a schooner in Rhode Island Sound. Scanlan’s had arranged berths onboard for Hunter and Ralph, and the captain had hired a rock band for a week and run a pirate flag up the mast. While their shipmates partied, the two of them watched the action—or rather, inaction—in the competition. The isolation of the separate crews dulled possibilities for conflict. Two full days were spent waiting for the weather to change. Ralph was sick to his stomach from being on the water. Hunter was fine. “You seem to be having a wonderful time in this nightmare,” Ralph told Hunter. “I rely on my medicine to keep totally twisted,” Hunter replied, and offered the artist one of his pills.
The LSD nearly blew off the top of Ralph’s head. “I started seeing red-eyed dogs emerging from the piano,” Ralph said. “My hair felt slick and I felt it coming down on my forehead like Hitler. The psilocybin just gouged out my interior.” Luckily, he had an experienced drug user at his side to guide him. By Hunter’s account, “Ralph was in an insane condition for three or four straight days.” They made a dinghy trip to shore, bought some supplies, and called Scanlan’s in New York. They learned that the magazine was going out of business. The America’s Cup story would be in the last issue, assuming they made deadline.
Fuck deadline. They were still spending Scanlan’s money . . . time for some real fun. Under cover of darkness, Hunter suggested vandalism. He produced cans of spray paint. He and Ralph rowed up to the hull of Gretel, the lead challenger from Australia. He deferred to Ralph: What would he want to spray on the side? Ralph thought for a moment and suggested, “Fuck the Pope.” He was in position, shaking the spray cans, when the noise of the ball in the can aroused a security guard. You there! What are you doing? Immediately, Ralph dropped the paint cans, and Hunter began rowing back to their schooner. The hull remained virgin.
The assignment was a bust. The Intrepid, the last classic wooden yacht to defend the cup, won the race for the Americans, but even if Hunter had done a story, he might not have had much use for that information. Results were never that important. No story ever appeared, though Ralph published an abbreviated America’s Cup portfolio in his 1976 book America. More importantly, he stored away his hallucinogenic visions from his Hunter-guided seagoing acid trip for use the following summer.
Back in Aspen, with his best freelance outlet belly up, there was only one thing for Hunter to do with his time and talent: scare the shit out of the populace. As if his shaved and gleaming skull and teardrop aviator shades hadn’t been enough to frighten Aspen taxpayers, Hunter’s political platform rattled them to their gonads and kept them tossing in sweaty sheets at night.
Hunter proposed changing Aspen’s name to Fat City. Who in their right mind would want to live in Fat City . . . visit Fat City . . . buy vacation homes in Fat City? Property values would plummet. He also wanted to jackhammer the streets and replace the asphalt with sod. Automobiles and trucks would be stopped at the city limits, and Fat City would have only foot and bike traffic. For amusement, citizens would visit the public square, to shower spittle on the bad dope dealers, punished there in the stocks.
Bob Braudis, a recent arrival from Boston, had escaped the corporate world for the ski-bum life. Hunter’s campaign drew his interest. “Everything he was saying I liked,” Braudis said. The incumbent was “a traditional redneck rural sheriff with a bunch of knuckle-dragging deputies.” The Aryan old guard in Aspen was made up largely of transplanted Germans who’d settled in Colorado after the Second World War. “They were to the right of Clorox,” Braudis said. Enchanted with the Freak Power platform, Braudis signed on as a foot soldier in Hunter’s campaign, helping to register the largely apathetic freak vote. His nodding acquaintance with Hunter would develop into a rich thirty-year friendship.
Hunter had been living in Pitkin County for only three years, but he was already known around town, and the mainstream townsfolk regarded him as “a half-mad cross between a hermit and a wolverine.” Sure, he’d been tolerated for his blaring rock music, and his love of guns and explosives. All that was well and good, as long as he kept his antics to his acreage up at Woody Creek. But in town in a position of power? No wonder they were losing sleep.
Hunter finally turned in his rant to Rolling Stone. It ran October 1, with the cover line “Freak Power in the Rockies” spread across the nose of musician Felix Cavaliere of the Rascals. It was just a month before the election and too late to motivate the nation’s freaks to descend on the town. Most of “The Battle of Aspen” (as the article was titled inside) recounted the previous year’s Joe-Edwards-for-Mayor campaign and the history of the Freak Power uprising. In 1970, Hunter was doing an end-run campaign, hoping that his over-the-top bid for sheriff would draw attention away from the race the Freak Power ticket really hoped to win, Ned Vare’s bid to become county commissioner. Also, Hunter’s old Louisville friend and Woody Creek neighbor, Billy Noonan, was running for coroner, because the coroner was the only official with the authority to remove the sheriff from office. “Hunter decided to be a lightning rod,” said Michael Solheim, the Freak Power campaign manager. “Ned was a quiet and conservative-seeming person, who in fact had a lot of undercurrents.” Solheim was part of the consortium that produced the Wallposter as well as the campaign—a group Hunter named the Meat Possum Athletic Club, in a nod to the Louisville group’s Hawks Athletic Club.
In telling the saga of Freak Power, Hunter came as close as he ever would to outlining a political philosophy. He provided an agenda for a generation of artists and writers, from musician Jimmy Buffett to then budding writer Carl Hiaasen. Hunter promoted rage against the machine, declaring war on greed-heads and land rapers. In Hunter’s view, the last half of the sixties marked the end of traditional politics. “The old Berkeley-born notion of beating The System by fighting it gave way to a sort of numb conviction that it made more sense in the long run to Flee, or even to simply hide, than to fight the bastards on anything even vaguely resembling their own terms.”
To the outsider, Hunter’s campaign seemed like purely recreational politics. Let’s do this and see what happens. Since Hunter was always known for pranks, maybe this was prankism raised to Cecil B. DeMille scale. But he discovered that a lot of people were mobilized by his campaign, by his charisma, and by what he had to say. They actually believed in him. “We really thought we had the momentum,” Braudis said. At that point, Hunter began taking the campaign seriously. Besides, running for office was something serious writers did—Norman Mailer and Upton Sinclair had each tested the waters, and failed.
In October, Hunter asked his old friend Porter Bibb to run the campaign. “I can’t do it,” Bibb told him. “If you win, it’s going to set law enforcement and jurisprudence back a half a century.” Other friends did come to help, including Bill Kennedy, his old pal from Puerto Rico. So did Oscar Acosta, who had run for sheriff of Los Angeles County and suffered annihilation at the polls. After the Rolling Stone article, the BBC sent a crew to Aspen. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Time magazine all took notice and even gave him a chance of winning. Even the cautious National Observer thought its old correspondent might be on the verge of a political breakthrough: “If Mr. Thompson is indeed elected sheriff, his techniques are likely to be copied by young people elsewhere.” The campaign drew so much attention because it seemed like a generational/philosophical/cultural conflict all in one. With people like Acosta stomping around town, the Aspen regulars grew suspicious and terrified. Solheim turned the bar at the Hotel Jerome into campaign headquarters (“That was the hive of political activity,” Braudis said). The addition of booze to the other substances Hunter, Acosta, and the others regularly ingested made the group even louder and more menacing.
Tensions were so high that the incumbent sheriff, Carol Whitmire, called in the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to see what could be done. Freak Power campaign leaders were advised to shut down operations at the Jerome, that there might be violence, presumably from the ardent right-wingers opposed to them. Solheim immediately took Sandy and Juan to his home for safekeeping (Sandy had been the key behind-the-scenes agent of the campaign). Hunter, Kennedy, his old friend John Clancy, and a radicalized former NFL player named Dave Meggysey turned the ranch into a fortified compound, ready to retaliate against any violence. There was a rumor about a plan to torch Owl Farm. Aside from one car full of crazies turned away from the gates, nothing happened.
“You can’t put the campaign in the context of any ‘normal’ political campaign,” Meggyesy said. “It was being done from a sense of outrage. . . . The point was to take the valley back from the greed-heads.”
It was close on election night. Surrounded by supporters and journalists, cameras and lights pressing in on him, wearing his blond bouffant wig, and wrapped in an American flag, Hunter led for a good part of the day, which startled him. In the end, the late returns from the trailer-park precincts sealed a win for the incumbent. “Hunter lost the goddamn redneck vote,” said his friend, political operative Dick Tuck. “He got the hippies and the in-town votes. He loved the plastic hippies.” Tuck had urged Hunter to work the trailer parks, but the candidate wasn’t interested. Still, he had come close: Thompson, 1,065 votes, Whitmire, 1,533 votes. Noonan and Vare also lost their races. “We would have won if we had taken the thing a drop more seriously,” Solheim said.
While supporters, some weeping and unable to accept his defeat, sniffled all around him, Hunter—still wearing the wig and flag—withstood the hot television lights and made his concession speech. “Unfortunately, I proved what I set out to prove,” he said, “that the American Dream really is fucked. I didn’t believe it until now.” He ripped off the wig and flashed the smile that made women melt. “I’ve already made up my mind—this is my last trip in politics . . . at least, this kind of politics.”
Other postmortems on the election followed. “If we can’t win in Aspen, we can’t win anywhere,” the New York Times quoted Hunter as saying, though at other times, he was more optimistic. “I didn’t really want to be sheriff,” he said. “I just wanted to own him.” He took satisfaction in knowing he had “scared the piss out of people.” Hunter soon had finished a 160-page manuscript about his run for sheriff, but the microscopic detail in his rendering of the Battle of Aspen probably would not have found a large audience. Still, he had begun writing his running autography.
Acosta had come to Colorado to help Hunter as a favor; now he wanted something in return. Acosta had a lot in common with Hunter. They had both endured stretches in the Air Force, they liked drink and drugs, and they were political radicals. Acosta used the GI Bill to get through San Francisco State and law school, passing the bar on his second attempt. But clients didn’t line up to hire the large, noisy, drug-addled Chicano attorney, because he might not play well in court. He was still working for the East Oakland Legal Aid Society when Solheim introduced him to Hunter during his 1967 visit to Aspen. He and Hunter had spent time together and become friends, a relationship deepened by their intense correspondence.
By 1968, Acosta had moved to Los Angeles and became active in El Movimiento, which hoped to do for Hispanic Americans what Martin Luther King had done for African Americans. White kids protesting the war had leftist attorney William Kunstler to bail them out when they got in trouble. Acosta saw himself as a Kunstler with salsa in his blood. Acosta was seen as a leader of the Chicano-rights movement. If he didn’t quite have the stature of Cesar Chavez, he was at least America’s second-most-well-known Hispanic activist.
Acosta spoke with the ferocity Hunter poured into his writing. As a limit pusher himself, Hunter liked having Oscar around for his amusement. “You never knew with Oscar what was going to happen next,” Hunter said.
Acosta wanted to draw Hunter into a story. He saw conspiracy in the murder of Los Angeles Times reporter Ruben Salazar. The police claimed his death was an accident, a natural byproduct of a riot in the barrio. But since Salazar had been deeply critical of the L.A. city government, Acosta felt he had been silenced. Hunter had actually started working on it (and even roughed out a draft) when Scanlan’s had been a viable publishing concern. Now that Rolling Stone was asking Hunter to write regularly, Acosta saw an even better deal. Hunter could come to L.A., do more interviews, update the piece. Getting the story in this hot new magazine, which went into the hands of rich young liberal white kids, would give him the pulpit he needed for the story, and Acosta might finally become a star.
Hunter’s deep-seeded loyalty was legendary among his friends. There were few things Hunter would not do for members of his tribe. But he was also drawn by Acosta’s passion and his own in-the-marrow sense that there was injustice in this case.
East L.A. was a war zone, and Hunter thought that in the eyes of some, he might be the enemy. Everyone was Hispanic. No matter what Acosta said, his helpers and bodyguards distrusted the gringo writer. Hunter stayed in a flophouse near Acosta’s office, but felt he was in danger. He was more afraid of being smacked around by Acosta’s associates than he ever had been of the Hell’s Angels. Hunter wanted some quality time with Acosta, to nail down a few of the details in the story, but he couldn’t do it in the flophouse or in the very pink Beverly Hills Hotel, where they decamped for drinks. Then the perfect solution presented itself.
Not only was it the perfect solution; it was something that someone else would pay for. One of Hunter’s old friends from National Observer days, Tom Vanderschmidt, had gone on to Sports Illustrated. He’d thrown Hunter what he thought might be some quick and easy freelance money: go to Las Vegas, watch a motorcycle race, and gather enough information for a 250-word copy block to go with a photo essay in the magazine. Hunter hadn’t yet committed, but he thought maybe what he needed to do was take Acosta to Las Vegas, get the private time he needed, do some nearly robotic reporting, and have Time Inc. pick up the tab. What happened in Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas. It became the genesis of Hunter’s most famous book, but first things first.
Hunter could finally piece together “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” his most serious piece of sustained reportage and also the most detailed example of semitraditional journalism that he committed for Rolling Stone.
Hunter wrote in takes—one- or two-page blasts of frenzy. These alone were not enough to carry a story. Hunter could live with ordinary passages, as long as those peaks were there. Still, this made it hard to assemble a decent magazine article. In such cases, the editor was a central figure, truly a collaborator in lashing together a story.
Everyone at Rolling Stone did double duty. Writers also served as editors. As a writer, David Felton was so slow that he was known as the Stonecutter. Maddeningly methodical, he was nonetheless revered for his work on the other side of the desk. His colleague Timothy Ferris once said that he could learn more from one Felton editorial comment than he could have learned from a year in some high-powered journalism school. He hung up a sign over his desk that said, “David Felton is always right.”
Felton had not yet moved to San Francisco and was still working out of L.A., so he drew the duty of editing Hunter’s massive Salazar article, not a plum assignment. “He is violent,” Felton said. “I’ve seen him yell at people till they burst into tears, and that’s violent.” Writer Craig Vetter was Hunter’s friend, but shuddered at the thought of working regularly with him. “I would hate to be his editor. He’s driven people out of journalism. He’s made old men of young, robust, and otherwise healthy men.”
Hunter’s work methods frustrated editors, Felton said, because he produced short bursts, and the editor’s job was to find the thread to connect the various passages. It was like assembling a quilt, finding a way to put a bunch of scraps together into something cohesive that served a clear purpose.
Endurance also was an issue. As an experienced user of chemicals, Hunter knew the combinations that would allow him to stay up and work steadily for days. Normal humans like Felton could not keep up. Eventually, Felton crashed and Hunter kept working.
From Felton, Hunter learned about the culture of Rolling Stone. There were several warring personalities, with Wenner as the top dog. The editorial staff was a revolving door. Wenner famously fired Ed Ward as music editor because of his messy office.
The first person with real staying power was Charlie Perry. His job title varied, but in the early days he was the man most responsible for getting the magazine out. That meant that when Hunter and Felton sent in parts of the Salazar story over the Mojo Wire, the ancestor of the fax machine, Perry was on the other end of the line, in San Francisco, staying up late to compile the ingredients.
“Hunter’s copy came in clean,” Perry said. “He was very proud of that and was scrupulous about spelling, particularly about spelling the names of prescription drugs correctly. Much of his writing would come in as bits, as episodes needing to be assembled.”
Hunter learned about Perry from Felton, who was terrified of his colleague. Perry was the deadline enforcer, and Felton was always running late. Felton told Hunter that while visiting the San Francisco office once, Perry dangled him from a window for being over deadline. Not quite true, Perry said. “I held him out of the window in the office,” he said. “Not all of him, just the top part of his body, his head and shoulders. But it was enough for Felton, and it became a story around the office.”
Hunter was summoned to San Francisco to write the final sections of the Salazar piece, supervised by Paul Scanlan, the managing editor of Rolling Stone. The staff got to observe the strange new writer up close. There was no office for him, so he was set up in the record library, with a typewriter on a small table. He worked furiously.
Charlie Perry dropped by for a visit. “I thought I’d stick my head in and introduce myself to the famous author of Hell’s Angels,” Perry recalled. “I said, ‘Hi, Hunter. I’m Charlie Perry. How’s it going?’” Hunter nearly leaped out of his seat and screamed, “I got momentum! I got this momentum! I’m a train on greased rails! I just need to keep the momentum up!” Perry said, “He sounded so hopped up. I didn’t understand why he was being so emphatic. He’d reacted to just hearing my name. Two days later, I passed by the record library and stuck my head in again. I said, ‘How are you doing?’ And he flinches and says, ‘I lost the momentum. I haven’t slept, I haven’t changed clothes. My feet are rotting.’ Then I realized that he had talked to Felton.”
Perry was the only editor to ever strike fear in Hunter. At first, although Perry admired Hunter’s reportorial skills on the Salazar story, he was not impressed by his writing. “It was a traditional piece,” Perry said. “In fact, it was too traditional. If I hadn’t gotten paid for reading it, I might not have finished it.”
Scanlan and Hunter did the final editing in the art department, each page spread out over the floor. They stared at the pages. Scanlan suggested a change, moving a page around like a king’s-knight-to-bishop-three. Hunter grunted his approval.
It was a different kind of article from Hunter, and a surprise to readers of “The Battle of Aspen.” While he showed up as the prominent narrator of “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” it was basically a profile of Acosta, the Chicano attorney crusading for truth and justice. There was little goofing around. This was the story of the death of a Chicano journalist during a racial riot and most Hispanics were convinced that Salazar was the victim of a cold-blooded murder.
The process part of the story is not quite as prominent as in the Killy and Derby articles, but he did bring the audience into the tent to show how he gathered information. At a critical moment, Hunter himself becomes the issue as angry militants debate his value to them and their cause. He deals frankly with his uneasiness.
Hunter’s reporting was honest enough to lead him away from the bad-white-man argument made by the militant Chicanos. His mission was not to validate Acosta’s claims but to find the truth. Along the way, Hunter stopped to take some of his usual shots, including a swipe at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, “a genuinely rotten newspaper that claims the largest circulation of any afternoon daily in America. As one of the few remaining Hearst organs, it serves a perverted purpose in its role as a monument to everything cheap, corrupt and vicious in the realm of journalistic possibility.”
And again, Hunter portrayed himself as a troublemaker, a screwup, the “frantic loser” that Wolfe described. “It was difficult, even for me,” he wrote, “to believe that the cops had killed him deliberately. I knew they were capable of it, but I was not quite ready to believe that they had actually done it . . . because once I believed that, I also had to accept the idea that they were prepared to kill anybody who seemed to be annoying them. Even me.”
Despite tensions between the Chicano community and the police and despite the well-founded suspicions of his militant associates, Hunter refused to accept the notion of a murder planned at the highest level of Los Angeles municipal government. The police department issued several versions of the event, methodically discounted by eyewitnesses; the militants suggested that these cover stories validated their accounts. Yet Hunter remained the skeptical journalist, in part because of the ever-changing cover stories from police. In the end, he concluded,
Ruben Salazar couldn’t possibly have been the victim of a conscious, high-level cop conspiracy to get rid of him by staging an “accidental death.” The incredible tale of half-mad stupidity and dangerous incompetence on every level of the law enforcement establishment was perhaps the most valuable thing to come out of the inquest. Nobody who heard that testimony could believe that the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department is capable of pulling off a delicate job like killing a newsman on purpose. Their handling of the Salazar case—from the day of his death all the way to the end of the inquest—raised serious doubts about the wisdom of allowing cops to walk around loose on the street. A geek who can’t hit a 20 foot wide ceiling is not what you need, these days, to pull off a clean first-degree murder.
Hunter had taken a step back from the in-your-face style of the Killy and Derby pieces. The Salazar article had the same sensibilities and individual voice, but it was not at warp speed. Acosta enjoyed being cast as a noble attorney, and the article was almost a detective story, in the manner of investigative reporting. By offering readers his prejudices up front, Hunter made all of his biases open and honest. Some were unjustified. In a brief passage on Chicano heritage, he evoked memories of the Alamo, which did not bear on the experiences of California Hispanics. One critic challenged him on this piece: “As usual, Thompson is barely interested in facts.” Hunter might have shrugged in reply.
It was also a long story. At twenty thousand words, it was the longest Rolling Stone article up to that point and definitely a shock to the magazine’s sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll readers, packaged as it was side by side with a profile of eleven-year-old singer Michael Jackson. No doubt Wenner was infatuated with Hunter Thompson. He had begun treating him like a rock star, giving him a sort of license no other member of the staff could obtain. He withstood ribbing—some good-natured, some mean-spirited—from Hunter and even endured the occasional blast from a fire extinguisher, a favored Thompson toy. The love was somewhat mutual. In spring 1971, things were good between Hunter and Wenner. The editor had just published two solid pieces by Hunter, and though there had been the usual haggling over fees and expenses, Hunter thought he had found a more sturdy home than Scanlan’s.
He had also been working on something else that he thought might be right for Rolling Stone. While working on the Salazar article, which had been an intense and emotional time, he had been writing something else for enjoyment, the way that a skilled athlete would work out before the big game. It was something personal and unusual, something done purely for pleasure.