"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like: "I feel a bit lightheaded. Maybe you should drive..... Suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car....and a voice was screaming and diving around the car....We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half uppers, downers, screamers, laughters....Also of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls....Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can....The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon." (1)
Long before the movie, there was the book, long before the book there was Hunter S. Thompson. When Hunter S. Thompson first composed these words in the early seventies, he was a young man who had just received acclaim for his then new book and bestseller, "Hell's Angels." Always one to seek adventure, Thompson became known early as a writer who roamed the backstreets of America and wrote stories, prose, and poetry about the underside currents existing below the mainstream culture of society. Resembling Ken Kesey in style and thematic matter, Thompson became obcessed with the idea that the real spirit of America was to be found in the by-roads and hills of surrounding countryside. He also became interested in exploring the hidden realms of the inner cities; sometimes traveling into the seedier dirtier streets of the city, where fear and suspicion were often known to permeate.
The story of Hunter S. Thompson has sprung from the misted covered waters of legend, until the mythos of Hunter S. Thompson and who he became have merged into the legend of some nightmare turned upside down causing critics to wonder as to the imagination of an American writer who seems to have left the critics guessing in the clicheic platitudes of their innate realism. Who is Hunter S. Thompson ? When does the illusion fall apart from the reality of moment, and the real being lying inside of Hunter S. Thompson begin ? These
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