Motor Mouth: Fear and Loathing behind the wheel of a ‘73 Caprice Convertible

Article content

“Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.” —Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Article content

Even when you know you’re old — and the creaks emanating from my back every morning never let me forget exactly how aged I’ve become — it can come as quite a shock to find the seminal reading of your youth, the inspiration for an entire career, a tome that forever changed journalism, is now a half-century in the rear-view mirror. Yes, folks, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas turned 50 this year.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

Motor Mouth: Fear and Loathing behind the wheel of a ‘73 Caprice Convertible Back to video

A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream came out when I was 14. But since I lived in Sept-Iles, Quebec, a ville so francophone it lacked an English bookstore, I didn’t read it until a year later when I went to university. Along with The Once and Future King by T.H. White; and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged , it pretty much guaranteed I would never use the engineering degree Carleton University would eventually bestow upon me (though, being a mother’s good son, I didn’t drop out and stuck around for my iron ring).

Article content

I was not alone. Fear and Loathing would eventually become a cult classic, no less than The New York Times Book Review naming it “the best book on the dope decade”; and Norman Mailer calling Thompson “a legend in successful self-abuse.” Even Driving’s editor, Jonathan Yarkony, fell under his sway, writing a thesis on the American Dream and Thompson’s corruption of it.

Of course, to many, Fear and Loathing is nothing more than a silly movie starring an even sillier Johnny Depp pretending to an intellect that merely comes across as loutishness. Worse yet, the only part everyone remembers is the drugs — the oft-quoted “two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers and laughers and, as coup de grace, a pint of raw ether,” not to mention enough alcohol to fuel multiple hotel room trashings.

Article content

Now, never mind that consumption of that many controlled substances seems fanciful at best, and probably would have rendered even the legendary Keith Richards — who supposedly once described getting clean as drinking only Jack Daniel’s every day — completely gibbering, or that this was but a small part of a body of work that would stretch from horse racing to the Hell’s Angels. At its heart, Fear and Loathing is nothing more than a road trip. A drug-addled, often vomitus, and always paranoid road trip, to be sure, but a road trip nonetheless.

Indeed, Thompson’s search for the American Dream has all the necessary ingredients for a classic road trip. For one thing, it had purpose. What people tend to forget amidst all its raucous tales of copious consumption is that the reason Thompson was heading to Las Vegas to cover an off-road motorcycle race, the Mint 400, for Sports Illustrated . Now the Mint may have since faded in importance, but back in the day, desert racing was a big deal, big enough that SI had assigned Hunter S. to do nothing more than caption the photographs of an event he would later describe as “trying to keep track of a swimming meet in an Olympic-sized pool filled with talcum powder instead of water.”

Article content

And no road trip is worth commemorating without a distinctive car, in this case a ginormous two-door 1973 Chevrolet Caprice Convertible — a.k.a. “the Great Red Shark” — with “adequate horsepower and the proper colouring.” There was the trouble-seeking sidekick, Fear and Loathing’s famed lawyer, Dr. Gonzo — actually based on Mexican-American lawyer and Chicano activist Oscar Zeta, who, The Economist claims, was so worried about being seen with a white writer that he insisted on being fictionalized into, well, a 300-pound Samoan. And, as with all good road trips — even those not nearly so drug-addled — there was a run-in with the highway patrol, though Thompson’s solution — a last-minute, high-speed, four-wheel drift down an off-ramp — may not be the best advice to heed.

Article content

There’s even a hint of the auto-journalist in Thompson’s meanderings, noting that the Cadillac Coupe De Ville he subsequently rented — once he turned the Red Shark into twisted and rendered junk — “is not your ideal machine for high-speed cornering in residential neighbourhoods.” Now, you can most certainly make the case that the suburban cul-de-sac is hardly the appropriate venue for testing high-speed cornering, but one can hardly argue Thompson’s analysis of the big Caddy’s handling. And just as any curious auto-journalist might — hopefully without the mind-curdling blotter acid as inspiration — Thompson seeks to curb its “mushy handling,” unfortunately by pumping the tires up to 75 psi in the hopes that “it might start cornering like a Lotus Elan.” That Thompson — a.k.a. Raoul Duke — wasn’t killed in a cataclysmic explosion of rubber and bias-plies just proves that the Lord has as much sympathy for the totally drug-addled as the piously self-righteous.

Article content

At its heart, Fear and Loathing is nothing more than a road trip—a drug-addled, often vomitus, and always paranoid road trip, to be sure, but a road trip nonetheless.

He also turns out to be a fan of the Vincent Black Shadow, the most legendary superbike of all time. Naturally, even this recollection suffers from the schizophrenia of combined drug and alcohol abuse, Thompson trying to enter the Black Shadow — the two-wheel equivalent of Ferrari’s equally historic GTO — in the Mint, claiming it had “two hundred brake-horsepower and a total curb weight of exactly two hundred pounds. ” Whether that delusion is the result of mixing too much tequila and peyote or simply woeful ignorance of all things two-wheeled is a conclusion I’ll leave to the reader.

Most importantly — at least if any such story is going to have legs beyond the merely vehicular — are the lessons any good road trip always engenders. Dismiss Thompson — and the gonzo journalism he inspired — all you want, but if you have a better description of Vegas — “not good for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted” — or the Strip’s business ethos (“They love drunks. Fresh meat.”), then maybe you should be applying to Rolling Stone . And Fear and Loathing’s coverage of the National District Attorneys’ conference on Narcotics and Drugs — it really was a long and diverse road trip — is as pointed a dismissal of America’s “war on drugs” today as it was 50 years ago.

Article content

Indeed, were your only exposure to Thompson the Johnny Depp character assassination, one would not know Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail , Thompson’s 12 months of covering the Democratic Party primaries that preceded Nixon’s re-election in 1972. Nor would you know that Thompson’s political leanings — in his one campaign for public office, he promised to disarm the police, turn downtown Aspen into a car-free zone, and rename the metropolis “Fat City” to curb soaring housing prices — have turned out to be as prophetic as anything Nostradamus imagined. And his A Dog Took My Place exposé of Roxanne Pulitzer’s 1982 divorce trial is as piercing a description of the corruption of the American Dream as ever been crafted.

As for Fear and Loathing , I vividly remember reading its 204 pages at the completely impressionable age of 15 and thinking this is how I wanted to live my life, throttle wide open until the wheels fall off. I may be, in complete contrast to Thompson, a virtual tee-totaller, and I certainly do not share his obsession with large-calibre handguns, but I think I might have gotten the road-trip thing right.