Pubdate: Sun, 19 Nov 2006
Source: New York Times (NY)
Section: Sunday Book Review
Copyright: 2006 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Will Blythe
Note: Will Blythe is the author of "To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever."
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Hunter+S.+Thompson (Hunter S. Thompson)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Ralph+Steadman (Ralph Steadman)

POISON PEN AND INK

THE JOKE'S OVER Bruised Memories: Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson, and Me. 
By Ralph Steadman. Illustrated. 396 pp. Harcourt. $26.

The illustrator Ralph Steadman is a brave man. Not only did he 
survive humiliation, gunplay and hallucinatory despair through 
decades of collaboration with the legendarily difficult journalist 
Hunter S. Thompson, he decided to include as the epigraph to his 
memoir of those adventures a remark of Thompson's: "Don't write, 
Ralph. You'll bring shame on your family."

To follow this with a 400-page ramble is the sort of dare the 
prank-loving Thompson, who committed suicide last year, might have 
appreciated. For the sake of the Steadman family's honor, it should 
be said that "The Joke's Over" features a lot of Steadman's drawings, 
though reduced too much from their original size. True, these 
pictures don't exactly constitute writing, but they are brilliant. 
Splattery explosions of ink, detonated in the presence of politicians 
and stolid middle-class citizens, they stand as the mangling visions 
of a 20th-century Hogarth. When they originally appeared (usually in 
Rolling Stone), lodged amid Thompson's prose, the images served as 
the visual equivalent of the writer's "gonzo" -- a term Steadman 
defines as "controlled madness" -- explorations of America.

As for Steadman's writing, let's just say it won't bring shame to his 
family, but it won't slather the clan with glory either.

At his best, Steadman, who is Welsh, does a passable imitation of 
Thompson's mad rants.

They met in 1970 on Thompson's home turf of Louisville, covering the 
Kentucky Derby on assignment for the short-lived magazine Scanlan's. 
Steadman's drawings -- vicious caricatures of local residents, 
including Thompson's brother -- shocked the writer with their predatory vigor.

Thompson, soon to become famous for a similar bloodthirsty tack in 
prose, demanded of the artist: "Why must you scribble these filthy 
ravings and in broad daylight too? ... This is Kentucky, not skid 
row. I love these people.

They are my friends and you treated them like scum." Their first 
collaboration ended with the journalist spraying Steadman from a can 
of Mace. "We can do without your kind in Kentucky. Now get your bags 
and get out, and take your rotten drawings with you!"

Isn't this how all great buddy movies begin?

Of course they were bound to work together again, and they did a few 
months later, scoping out the America's Cup in Newport, R.I. 
Steadman, a woozy sailor, asked Thompson if he might have one of the 
little yellow tablets that he assumed the writer had been taking for 
seasickness. Thompson obliged; a colossal acid trip ensued.

The two men decided to jump-start their nonexistent story by 
spray-painting profanities deriding the pope on the hulls of 
multimillion-dollar racing yachts. Detected, they panicked, nearly 
setting a boat on fire with a flare. "Pigs everywhere!" Thompson 
cried. "We must flee like hunted animals." Steadman spouted 
gibberish, which Thompson avidly recorded in his notebook. "That's 
good, Ralph. .. Go on. What else?"

Steadman ended up catching a flight to New York -- no shoes, no socks 
and a suitcase containing only dirty underwear and a sketchbook. He 
collapsed at a friend's home, where a doctor was summoned and shot 
him full of Librium. "This trip ... established a pattern of 
journalism, if that is what it was, that cemented my friendship with 
Hunter and laid the ground plan for future assignments. ... It 
remains a defining moment in the evolution of gonzo and, without 
doubt, a dress rehearsal for 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.' For 
Hunter, it provided living proof that going crazy as a journalistic 
style was possible."

For a few years in the 1970s, it did appear that insanity was a great 
career move, that a deranged journalist might fruitfully subvert 
tired conventions that kept a writer from injecting himself into his 
work. "He was his own best story," Steadman writes. "The Joke's Over" 
shows Thompson stumbling and mumbling his way through the early '70s 
with the heart of a lawyer for the A.C.L.U. and the brain of an 
acidhead. His gift then was not so much for intoxication as for high 
dudgeon. Thirty-five years after its publication, "Fear and Loathing 
in Las Vegas," illustrated by Steadman at bargain rates (he's still 
bitter), holds up as more than a generational relic.

Thompson depicts himself as a drug-taking idealist blundering through 
a nightmare, all the while gripping his sanity as tightly as a steering wheel.

Of course, the gonzo journalism that Steadman claims he and Thompson 
tripped their way into always amounted to a high-risk proposition. 
"The Joke's Over" makes clear that Thompson was always writing about 
himself under the influence, that presidential campaigns, for 
instance, were just another form of intoxicant, a deranging ordeal 
capable of twisting the mind as surely as a tab of LSD. If the self 
wasn't up to snuff, the stories could become as tedious as an 
overheard cellphone conversation, exercises in terminal narcissism.

The second half of Steadman's memoir, which spans the years from 1980 
to Thompson's death, is a sad, sloppy affair, puffed out with faxes 
and bad song lyrics.

No writer, it appears, is a hero to his illustrator, at least not 
when money is involved.

Their collaboration floundered over ill-fated projects.

Thompson "was much more into deals than personal affection," Steadman 
complains.

The prosecutorial details mount.

Seemingly against his own wishes, Steadman indicts Thompson on 
matters large and small.

The writer's feet stank because he wore Converse sneakers without socks.

He was unkind to pets; Steadman shows Thompson hauling his mynah bird 
Edward out of his cage for refusing to speak, and then berating the 
creature. "There is not a bird-God who is going to save you now, 
Edward! ... You are doomed!" In Steadman's view, Thompson treated his 
young son, Juan, with only slightly more finesse, grabbing him by the 
ear and twirling him about the room "like an average-sized cat." And 
yet, conflicted to the last, Steadman writes, "I saw nothing 
uncommonly vicious." It was "as though the outward signs of distance 
and malevolent behavior were put on strictly for visitors."

Indeed, by the end of his life, Thompson had turned himself into a 
totem of his own invention, and spent his days rattling the bars 
formed by the cage of his celebrity.

His illustrator tries to put the best possible light on the matter, 
but betrayed and appalled, he can't. All told, it's not a pretty picture.
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