The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [166]
But I don’t need it now. Nor do I want it. That’s youth’s game. And quite a game. It can be an admirable, even treacherous game. But it belongs to youth.
DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
by P.J. O’Rourke
November 28, 1996
At the time you were writing ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ you implied that things had gone wrong with the Sixties, that it was a flawed era.
Well, the truth of the matter was, there was Kent State, there was Chicago, there was Altamont. The Sixties was about the Free Speech Movement long before it was about the flower children. I was more a part of the Movement than I was of the Acid Club. But you knew that something was happening. You have to remember that acid was legal. [Ken] Kesey was a leader of the psychedelic movement. Berkeley was a whole different thing. The music was another thing. There was the Matrix [club], Ralph Gleason, everything.
I had the best time of my life in the Sixties, and I rail and curse against it because I miss it. But when we really get to talking about it, and when I really get to remembering what actually happened, I recall that it was a horrifying period.
But we really had the illusion of power—the illusion of being in charge. Which was quite liberating. We did drive one president out of the White House.
You have given a pretty negative depiction of the effect of drugs in your work. Basically, nothing happy happens to people when they take drugs. Instead, it’s Edge City. There’s a lot of stuff that you’ve written that Nancy Reagan could have used—“Kids, this is what’ll happen.”
Whether it’s negative or not, the reality of it is, you start playing with drugs, the numbers aren’t on your side for coming up smelling like roses and being president of the United States. I did at some point describe the difference between me and, say, [Timothy] Leary’s concept—you know, that drugs were a holy experience and only for, you know, the drug church. I am in favor of more of a democratization of drugs. Take your chances, you know. I never felt that, aside from a few close friends, it was my business to advocate things.
Do you think there’s anything interesting about drugs for making art?
Yeah, totally interesting. But it took me about two years of work to be able to bring a drug experience back and put it on paper.
And not make it sound like a script for ‘The Trip’ with Peter Fonda.
To do it right means you must retain that stuff at the same time you experience it. You know, acid will move your head around and your eyes, and whatever else you perceive things with. But bringing it back was one of the hardest things I had ever had to do in writing.
You can kid about it. But to really put it down on paper, to be honest about it . . .
Well, that’s what Vegas is about. It’s about the altered perceptions of the characters. To me, that’s really the bedrock of the book—their responses to one another’s questions. It’s like in the Three Stooges, that story where they were out in the rowboat in a lake and it sprung a leak. And the boat was filling up with water. So they decided to bash a hole in the bottom of the boat to let the water out. Now that’s drug reasoning.
How do you write about it?
Well, you know, I wrote it in the process. I wrote it by hand at first, in notebooks. And in fear. Oscar had left me there with a pound of weed and a loaded .357, and some bullets in his briefcase.
And no money.
I couldn’t pay the bill. And I was afraid. And I was waiting for the right hour to leave the hotel through the casino.
And earlier I’d slowly, you know, moved stuff down to the car, small amounts, in and out. But there was one big, metal Halliburton [suitcase] that there was no way to get out. I was trying to pick the right time to leave. I remember at 4:30 in the morning, a poker game was going on, nothing but poker games. I just walked through the casino nonchalantly carrying this big Halliburton. I was afraid. I was afraid of taking off, you know,