Thompson - The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

Gonzo 1 - The Great Shark Hunt

Author's Note

"Art is long and life is short,

and success is very far off."

-- J. Conrad

Well... yes, and here we go again.

But before we get to The Work, as it were, I want to make sure I know how to cope with this elegant typewriter -- (and, yes, it appears that I do) -- so why not make this quick list of my life's work and then get the hell out of town on the 11:05 to Denver? Indeed. Why not?

But for just a moment I'd like to say, for the permanent record, that it is a very strange feeling to be a 40-year-old American writer in this century and sitting alone in this huge building on Fifth Avenue in New York at one o'clock in the morning on the night before Christmas Eve, 2000 miles from home, and compiling a table of contents for a book of my own Collected Works in an office with a tall glass door that leads out to a big terrace looking down on The Plaza Fountain.

Very strange.

I feel like I might as well be sitting up here carving the words for my own tombstone... and when I finish, the only fitting exit will be right straight off this fucking terrace and into The Fountain, 28 stories below and at least 200 yards out in the air and across Fifth Avenue.

Nobody could follow that act.

Not even me... and in fact the only way I can deal with this eerie situation at all is to make a conscious decision that I have already lived and finished the life I planned to live -- (13 years longer, in fact) -- and everything from now on will be A New Life, a different thing, a gig that ends tonight and starts tomorrow morning.

So if I decided to leap for The Fountain when I finish this memo, I want to make one thing perfectly clear -- I would genuinely love to make that leap, and if I don't I will always consider it a mistake and a failed opportunity, one of the very few serious mistakes of my First Life that is now ending.

But what the hell? I probably won't do it (for all the wrong reasons), and I'll probably finish this table of contents and go home for Christmas and then have to live for 100 more years with all this goddamn gibberish I'm lashing together.

But, Jesus, it would be a wonderful way to go out... and if I do you bastards are going to owe me a king-hell 44-gun salutr (that word is salute, goddamnit -- and I guess I can't work this elegant typewriter as well as I thought I could)...

But you know I could, if I had just a little more time.

Right?

Yes.

HST #I, R.I.P.

12/23/77

Fear and Loathing in the Bunker

"... the milkman left me a note yesterday.

Get out of this town by noon,

You're coming on way too soon

And besides that

we never liked you anyway..."

-- John Prine

Woody Creek, Col.-- Strange epitaph for a strange year and no real point in explaining it either. I haven't had a milkman since I was ten years old. I used to ride around on the route with him, back in Louisville. It was one of those open-door, stand-up vans that you could jump in and out of on the run. He would creep that rancid-smelling truck along the street from house to house while I ran back and forth with the goods.

I was the runner, the mule, and occasionally the bagman when some poor wretch behind on her milk bill had to either pay up or drink water for breakfast that morning.

Those scenes were always unsettling -- some half-awake, middle-aged housewife yelling at me in her bathrobe through the screen door. But I was a cold-hearted little bastard in those days. Sorry ma'am, but my boss out there in the truck says I can't leave these bottles here unless you give me $21.16...

No argument ever fazed me. I doubt that I even heard the words. I was there to collect, not to listen and I didn't give a hoot in hell if they paid or not; all I really cared about was the adrenalin rush that came with sprinting across people's front lawns, jumping hedges, and hitting that slow-rolling truck before it had to stop and wait for me.

There is some kind of heavy connection between that memory and the way I feel right now about this stinking year that just ended. Everybody I talk to seems very excited about it. God damn, man! it was a fantastic year, they say. Maybe the most incredible year in our history.

Which is probably true. I remember thinking that way, myself, back on those hot summer mornings when John Dean's face lit my tube day after day... incredible. Here was this crafty little ferret going down the pipe right in front of our eyes, and taking the President of the United States along with him.

It was almost too good to be true. Richard Milhous Nixon, the main villain in my political consciousness for as long as I can remember, was finally biting that bullet he's been talking about all those years. The man that not even Goldwater or Eisenhower could tolerate had finally gone too far -- and now he was walking the plank, on national TV, six hours a day -- with The Whole World Watching, as it were.

That phrase is permanently etched on some grey rim on the back of my brain. Nobody who was at the corner of Michigan and Balboa on that Wednesday night in August of 1968 will ever forget it.

Richard Nixon is living in the White House today because of what happened that night in Chicago. Hubert Humphrey lost that election by a handful of votes -- mine among them -- and if I had to do it again I would still vote for Dick Gregory.

If nothing else, I take a certain pride in knowing that I helped spare the nation eight years of President Humphrey -- an Administration that would have been equally corrupt and wrongheaded as Richard Nixon's, far more devious, and probably just competent enough to keep the ship of state from sinking until 1976. Then with the boiler about to explode from eight years of blather and neglect, Humphrey's cold-war liberals could have fled down the ratlines and left the disaster to whoever inherited it.

Nixon, at least, was blessed with a mixture of arrogance and stupidity that caused him to blow the boilers almost immediately after taking command. By bringing in hundreds of thugs, fixers and fascists to run the Government, he was able to crank almost every problem he touched into a mindbending crisis. About the only disaster he hasn't brought down on us yet is a nuclear war with either Russia or China or both... but he still has time, and the odds on his actually doing it are not all that long. But we will get to that point in a moment.

For now, we should make every effort to look at the bright side of the Nixon Administration. It has been a failure of such monumental proportions that political apathy is no longer considered fashionable, or even safe, among millions of people who only two years ago thought that anybody who disagreed openly with the Government was either paranoid or subversive. Political candidates in 1974, at least, are going to have to deal with an angry, disillusioned electorate that is not likely to settle for flag-waving and pompous bullshit. The Watergate spectacle was a shock, but the fact of a millionaire President paying less income tax than most construction workers while gasoline costs a dollar in Brooklyn and the threat of mass unemployment by spring tends to personalize Mr. Nixon's failures in a very visceral way. Even Senators and Congressmen have been shaken out of their slothful ruts, and the possibility of impeachment is beginning to look very real. Given all this, it is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. It's like Sisyphus, he said. We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain... and it rolled right back down on us.