This has been described as a roman a clef – a fiction based on a non fictional version of events with the identities
changed in an identifiable way. The story is clear enough –
Thompson, was engaged while enjoying a drug enhanced interlude in a Los Angeles hotel with his attorney (“Gonzo”, an alias) to go to Las Vegas and cover the Mint 400 cross country motorcycle race. Thompson enthused about the vast and colourful array of psychedelic and stimulating drugs he and his attorney purchased for the trip, rented a loud and ostentatious car, embarked on their journey and immediately began consuming the drugs (interestingly Thompson later comments that by 1971 the ‘60’s style drugs of this journey were out of style for all but dilettante drug users: everyone was using downers and heroin – a literary device he used to taunt his reading public for its factual ignorance of the drug culture.) They pick up a Midwestern hitchhiker and Thompson again highlights the culture gap using the boy’s terrified reactions to their erratic behaviour and hallucinations.
Thompson then initiated his theme of their “journey to Vegas to find the American Dream.” This is irony, of course, but he is hardly the first and, given that (I have heard) early in his career, he retyped the Great Gatsby – another paean to the American Dream gone astray – to better learn to write (and Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms. He also associated with the Beat poets), he likely expected certain of his readers to understand . Superficially, his writing sounds like competent but juvenile sarcasm and ridicule of authority (and that perception sold many copies to fans) but it entails more than just frustration of the youthful counterculture with authority and their elation at accomplishing mischief. It contemplates the futility of trying to create something better in American or perhaps human civilization. There are a couple of asides - the famous Wave speech about the summer of love and what went wrong plus a bonus speech about Nixon’s rise coinciding with the advent of the “downer” generation and, dear to my own heart, his vitriolic philippic against contemporary journalists near the end of the book.
He eloquently defines Gonzo journalism: “but what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it
now. Pure
Gonzo Journalism” (p. 12) Somehow this resonates more deeply than McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message.
The hitchhiker fled at a gas station. Thompson and Atty Gonzo arrived at the Mint Hotel and proceeded to spend half their time working at the race finish line and on forays to the route and half of their time consuming more drugs and alcohol, terrorising the staff, destroying their room, and running up an immense credit bill. Finally, Gonzo, fearful of the consequences fled for Los Angeles by airplane, leaving Thompson to slip out of his room and race across the desert (not having slept in 3 days) in the conspicuous red convertible before their perfidy is discovered at check out. Thompson was cornered by the CHP and elected to go back to Las Vegas where the Rolling Stone had commissioned him for a story on a National District Attorneys conference at the Flamingo Hotel. This is literary artifice. In fact, both went home and Thompson turned in a credible story. The two returned for the DA meet in April.
According to the story, Thompson found his attorney already at the Flamingo with an young woman he had given LSD and taken cruel advantage of.
The two ensconced the woman, still high, at the Americana and spent the remainder of the trip attending the conference, impersonating undercover narcotics officers to take advantage of staff, terrorize officers ignorant of the realities of drug culture and live it up for a little longer all with studied panache and some unbelievable good fortune. The story closes with Thompson returning a demolished never-before-driven Cadillac to the rental lot and catching his own flight to Colorado ruminating on how the American dream in Las Vegas was about ambition, yes, but also indifference, ignorance, intolerance and cruelty (I think de Tocqueville, though a fan, may have gently warned us as much over a century before).
Interestingly I think it was Thompson’s intent that his own and Gonzo’s characters were intended to show the rottenness of our collective character as much as the people they ridiculed, a nuance lost on many fans of the book. Ergo, what almost happened in the sixties ultimately was unable to happen not because they stopped us (though they doubtless wanted to) but because we all are collectively what we are. There is much more to say about this book and Thompson but I will close by saying it is saddening but interesting that Thompson chose to end his life in the same manner as a man whose writing he had adored and whose own suicide in Ketchum, Idaho Thompson had been sent to report on many years before.