Fear & Loathing in San Francisco
The house at 318 Parnassus Street that Hunter Thompson once called home is a two-story building that appears as anonymous and drab as Thompson was unique and colorful. But if only walls could talk …
Monsieur “Gonzo” defined a new kind of narrative journalism in which objectivity was blown to pieces and the writer became both protagonist and antagonist. Talese, Capote, Mailer, and Wolfe all had similar ideas about nonfiction novels, but Thompson took it a step further. His perspective was from the counterculture—defined as those angry, free young rebels who couldn’t live with the establishment. Thompson himself was an outraged gun-carrying activist whose own credo was “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”
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Address 318 Parnassus Street, San Francisco, CA, 94117 | Public Transport Bus: 6, 43 (Parnassus Ave & Willard St stop) | Tip Take a walk in the Cole Valley neighborhood. Above the awning of Crepes on Cole at 100 Carl Street, you can see the remains of the old sign for the Other Café, a comedy spot where Robin Williams and Dana Carvey performed before they hit the big time.
In 1965, while living at 318 Parnassus, he spent a year getting tangled up in the dramatic world of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, which was run out of Oakland and led by Sonny Barger. Barger once famously said, “If I ever get too old to ride my motorcycle and have pretty girls, I’d rather just rob a bank and go back to prison.” Thompson got up inside their lives and wrote it all down. His year of living dangerously ended with him on the receiving end of a brutal beating by the Angels. His publisher couldn’t have been happier and his first book, Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, became a best seller.
Thompson used a gun to take his own life in 2005. His suicide note to his wife was published in Rolling Stone magazine: “No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your (old) age. Relax—This won’t hurt.”
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