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A lot of people have asked me over the years what it was like to be Hunter Thompson's assistant. They'll just say, "So what was that like?" Sometimes they'll be slightly more specific: "Did he really do all that stuff he wrote about?"—which is a sort of backward way into "Was he as crazy as he seemed?" That one's easy: The short answer to almost any question about Hunter is usually just "Yes."
More often than not I've simply parried the question with the careful unwrapping of a well-honed story of some particular time spent locked in a crucible of terror with Dr. Gonzo. (There's "Blow-up Sex-Doll Mission," or "Resuscitating from Comatose State," or maybe "Throwing Large Object Out of Hotel Window—Aborted.") After 15 years, I'm glad I made it out alive. I'm still relieved that neither of us was arrested. And I'm grateful to be able to declare myself—finally—fundamentally sane.
In the summer of 1989 I had just finished college at Georgetown. My housemates were variously preparing to enter law school, considering the priesthood, and experimenting with Rogaine as a prophylactic measure. I was experimenting with staying high every waking moment of the day in a high-functioning state, and it was during this mercifully brief period that I began reading Hunter S. Thompson's first anthology, The Great Shark Hunt, aggressively and evangelically. His style seemed to use laughter as a sort of Trojan horse to smuggle incendiary ideas and righteous outrage into the brain and sear them there. It was as if the author himself were imparting a lesson: that things were at stake; that the world would require more attention and engagement from me; and that this could be loads of fun. I started to wonder if the writer really did all that stuff he wrote about; and then I wondered what it would be like to hang out with him.
Three years later, while working at Rolling Stone, I took my first phone call from Hunter S. Thompson to discuss arrangements for a story he was working on. He spoke constantly, in a machine-gun stop-start monologue of which I comprehended exactly nothing: I could tell when he sounded pleased and when he sounded angry or impatient or indignant, but that's it. The calls (and my ability to understand them) quickly became more regular. A few months later my boss came to me with an extracurricular assignment: Pick up Hunter at the airport and—his words exactly, in toto, delivered with a sly grin—"just see what happens."
What happened was that I missed him at the gate. Only as people began to disembark did I realize that I had no clue what the legend actually looked like in human form. He existed to me as an idea—some sort of gun-toting, whiskey-swilling, speed-jabbering Robin Hood—and there were no ideas walking off the plane from Denver. What I found downstairs, amid the drab conveyor belts of the baggage claim, was a tired and agitated man sitting on the floor against a wall and sweating profusely. He extended his arm and I nervously extended my own for a handshake; Hunter grabbed it and nearly pulled me to the ground as he barked, "No, goddammit! Help me up!"
