AllThePre-SpeedBabbleThatFits
AlmostAlwaysStandingOnConvictionVille
Look.
I read huge chunks of what the author himself once called the ‘failed attempt’ that was ‘The Rum Diary’ a long, long time ago.
And, like I’ve said before….
Despite my great admiration for his best work, Hunter Thompson was no Earnest Hemingway.
Or even a cut-rate F. Scott Fitzgerald.
So, I reckon I’ll hold onto my own money until he who would be Raoul Duke (ie. the former kid from Lotusland’s 21 Jump St.) is able to bamboozle somebody else into giving him even more moola to make the real Gonzo origin movie story.
Instead, it will be about South America and Thompson’s time there as a so-called stringer for the ‘National Observer’.
Because those were the days, as near as I can figure it, when Thompson first really started making stuff up.
Stuff that was sometimes turned out to be truer than the real truth could ever be.
And that includes that piece he wrote about Sonny Barger and the East Bay hoodlums for Carey McWilliams and ‘
The Nation’ that would later become his almost, but not quite ever, meal ticket.
Truth like this:
“…One of my most vivid memories of South America is that of a man with a golf club – a five-iron, if memory serves – driving golf balls off a penthouse terrace in Cali, Columbia. He was a tall Britisher, and had what the British call ‘a stylish pot’ instead of a waistline. Beside him on a small patio table was a long gin-and-tonic, which he refilled from time to time at the nearby bar.
He had a good swing, and each of his shots carried low and long out over the city. Where they fell, neither he nor anyone else on the terrrace that day had the vaguest idea…..Somewhere below us, in the narrow streets that are lined by the white adobe blockhouses of the urban peasantry, a strange hail was rattling down on the roofs – golf balls, ‘old practice duds,’ so the Britisher told me, that were ‘hardly worth driving away’.
It is doubtful that the same man would drive golf balls off a rooftop apartment in the middle of London. But (it) is not really surprising to see it done in South America. There, where the distance between the rich and the poor is so very great, and where Anglo-Saxons are automatically among the elite, the concept of noblesse oblige is subject to odd interpretations.
The attitude, however, does not go unnoticed; the natives consider it bad form indeed for a foreigner to stand on a rootop and drive golf balls into their midst. Perhaps they lack sporting blood, or maybe a sense of humor, but the fact is that they resent it, and it is easy to see why they might go to the polls at the next opportunity and vote for the man who promises to rid the nation of ‘arrogant gringo imperialists’….”
Hunter S Thompson, The National Observer, August 1963
Reprinted in: “The Great Shark Hunt, Warner Books, 1979, pp 404-405
99 percenters, indeed.
OK?
________
Interestingly, my most far-flung visitors come calling after they’ve searched the string looking for another, later, National Observer piece titled “What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum” which takes them to this post…..Last night it flew somebody in from, get this…..Estonia….Imagine that!
And please note: That is most certainly no stinkin’ selectric with a kick bigger than an elephant gun in the image at the top of the post….
.
