When Hunter himself finally disappeared, when he shot himself, my first reaction was that it might have been slightly more respectful of the living had Hunter, who loved explosions, gone off in the woods and blown himself into slightly smaller bits. He chose otherwise, of course, and in the days after he died, a couple of journalists called for quotes. I told them that I liked Hunter as much as a lover could like a hater, from which I hoped they could infer that this meant "not very much." I did respect the dude, however, so, in his wake, I re-read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and found it just as peculiar now as I did then.
First, nothing that happens in the book requires Las Vegas as a setting. It all could have happened in any American city during the seventies, and did, in fact, happen, because there were no places then, just blur and drift. Second, Hunter's hysterical loathing for working stiffs and service personnel remains inexplicable to me. The waiter at the Polo Lounge is a dwarf; the store clerk is a mongoloid; the room service waiter is a reptile; the lady at check-in is a gorgon, and I hate this about the book. Savaging the weak is not funny, even if you're purportedly "tripping," and also, as a matter of journalistic practice, these working stiffs are invariably the sources from whom you get the story, because Lou Reed, for all his candor, is not going to share with a journalist his late night room service order for KY Jelly.
Finally, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas feels as squirmy as the "puritanical" tone of the narrative, during which Hunter describes himself committing a whole cornucopia of transgressions and felonies. He drives recklessly, wrecks cars, totes guns, drops acid, snorts coke, sniffs ether and smokes dope. He insults civilians, walks checks and dodges the tab at the fancy hotel—and all of this, I shamefully admit, was pretty much de rigeur for "cultural reporters" in those years. The strange thing, however, is that, for all the crime and bad manners, there is no sin in Hunter's "Sin City," and, minus sin, Hunter's Vegas tastes like sucking pennies.
In fact, there is no sex at all in Fear and Loathing, nor is there sex in any of Hunter S. Thompson's writings, and this glaring omission genuinely distorts the cultural milieu he portrays. The seventies, I can assure you, were sexy all the time, even sexier at night and much sexier in Vegas. And, in those days, one did not go out on the road with Aerosmith or even Hubert Humphrey to huff glue with celebrities. That is a contemporary kink. You went out there for the sexiness of the whole scene—everyone but Hunter, that is, which makes him prescient, I guess, Jeff Skilling, avant le lettre, wasted, drooling and snarling at the waiter. Oh, please.