***Buy The Ticket-Take The Ride- Doctor Gonzo-Hunter S. Thompson At The End

 

 

Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century by Hunter S. Thompson

Make no mistake the late, lamented Hunter Thompson was always something of a muse for me going way back to the early 1970’s when I first read his seminal raw and no-holds-barred (or only a few in order to save his teeth, arms, legs, head, whatever from any adverse blowback-those guys with the whipsaws and chains were serious and seriously knew how to use the damn things) work on the Oakland-based outlaw bikers, The Hell’s Angels. Since then I have devoured, and re-devoured virtually everything that he has written. I have reviewed many of those efforts elsewhere in this space. As I noted recently in reviewing his 2004 work Hey, Rube not all his efforts have been equally compelling. That was the case in panning Hey, Rube (basically some scribbles bemoaning the decline of major league football in America as a sporting proposition anyway) but here we are on much more solid tradition ‘gonzo’ style from the old days. Maybe it is because this work is in the form of a memoir and thus intentionally places the good Doc’s actions in the center of the writing that makes this more in the mold of his better compilations like The Great Shark Hunt and Songs Of The Doomed.

Thompson uses a stream of consciousness trope going from the present (early 2000s) and his then current doings and splices them together, in some segments randomly, to events as far back as his childhood in Louisville, Kentucky. Along the way we find out him at age nine in trouble with the FBI. Down and dirty in Rio with the crazies. Incessantly testing his beloved guns and various hot motorcycles (how about a Vincent Black Lightning) at various and sundry appropriate and inappropriate times. Taking trips to places like Vietnam just before the fall, Cuba, Grenada after the invasion and elsewhere where the journalistic action might be and a story, in the Thompson style, might develop.

Needless to say there is plenty of ink about sex, drug and rock and roll including his deeply affecting and traumatic tangle with the law in home port Colorado in the early 1990s (and prove positive that they were really out to get him any way they could and so any sly thoughts of paranoia on his, or his partisans parts, were laughable in the face of that governmental full-court press). That, my friends, was a close call (although the governmental madnesses later on the civil rights front in post 9/11 era make that time seem Arcadian).  And throughout, as usual, there are pithy political comments about the various idiots-in-chiefs (aka Presidents of the USA) and their henchman (hench people?) that he spent his life hammering. Maybe not your way, definitely not my way, but his way. His fateful run for Sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket in 1970 probably set the tone of his politics accurately. Some big old popular front like back in FDR times, times long gone and ain’t coming back and so, yes, Arcadian. For those who have read other works by Thompson some of the signature language may be old hat as he meanders along in this volume. For others it is a chance to learn the lingo. Buy the ticket, take the ride. Enough said.