A friend once asked me to name the five funniest books I’ve ever read. I can’t remember them all now, but I know Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was on it. I remember reading “Las Vegas” in college, probably the optimum time for a first encounter with Thompson. I was completely taken by its raw, dangerous, hilarious energy. I knew I could never live as Thompson did, but the idea of writing like him was tremendously appealing.

I read “Hell’s Angels” and “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail” and received “The Great Shark Hunt” as a particularly treasured Christmas gift. But after that, Thompson began to fall in my estimation. I found “The Curse of Lono” more or less unreadable. I saw Thompson speak at UC Berkeley and didn’t find his drunken ramblings at all enlightening and amusing.

In the mid-Eighties, Thompson came to work for my semi-employer, the San Francisco Examiner. This was the bright idea of then-publisher Will Hearst, but it didn’t really pan out. I regret never meeting the good Doctor in the hallways or the newsroom, but from all accounts, his time in San Francisco was a miserable experience for pretty much everyone involved. After that, I didn’t make much effort to seek out his new work.

When Thompson shot himself in 2005, I was disturbed by the way he seemed to make no attempt to spare the feelings of his son, wife and daughter-in-law. But I couldn’t say I was surprised. The introduction to “The Great Shark Hunt” makes clear his thoughts on suicide.

When I heard about “Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson,” an oral history by Jenn Wenner and Corey Seymour, I was immediately interested and requested it at the local library. But a funny thing happened once I got my hands on it. I flipped through it, read some choice quotes from Jack Nicholson, Ralph Steadman, Jimmy Buffett, Tom Wolfe and others, but I could never bring myself to sit down and read the volume straight through. It suddenly seemed too arduous, a task that would only depress me. I could see the arc of Thompson’s talent, health and sanity, and I didn’t want to witness their inevitable crash.

Maybe I would have persevered if I hadn’t read “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” the oral biography of Thompson’s good friend, musician Warren Zevon. I actually liked that book, even though it told me more than I ever wanted to know about Zevon’s alcoholism, obsessive compulsive disorders and the crappy ways he treated his kids, friends and lovers. But Zevon at least achieved a kind of grace in his last days and never betrayed his great talent. “Life’ll Kill Ya” and parts of “The Wind” are as good as anything he produced in his early days.

But for Thompson, I couldn’t struggle through hundreds of pages of bad behavior and squandered potential in order to celebrate one of the most distinctive literary voices of the late 20th century. “Gonzo” went back to the library after six weeks.

My tolerance for “geniuses” who abuse their loved ones seems to be on the wane as I grow older.

Tags: gonzo, Hunter Thompson, Las Vegas, memoirs

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