Fear and loathing on the Kona coast

HST and me

The view from the Kona Inn at dusk

We were walking along Ali’i Drive, enjoying an after-dinner stroll, when we saw it: The Kona Inn, one of the oldest watering holes on the island, beckoning to us like a siren.

I’d flown in from San Diego that morning and my biological clock was three hours ahead. Nuvia’s journey originated in Guangzhou, China with stops in Shenzen, Seoul, Honolulu and finally Kailua-Kona on “the big island” of Hawai’i. Her biological clock was a matter of speculation.

A short stroll was all we were up for, but we’d changed into our bathing suits in case we felt inspired to dip our toes in the ocean.

Before coming to the Kona coast, I’d re-read The Curse of Lono by Hunter S. Thompson. The first time I read the book in the early ‘90s it made a big impression on me. It has all the hallmarks of Thompson’s gonzo journalism: a blend of reportage with a first-person account of the events he’s writing about.

For example, he doesn’t simply cover the Honolulu Marathon, he inserts himself and his hedonistic ways into the story, making his irreverent style of reporting an essential part of the narrative.

Anyone can write about a race, was Thompson’s thinking, but few can write about it while under the influence of gross quantities of alcohol and drugs and surrounded by nefarious characters that lend an aura of danger to the proceedings.

It’s all very meta.

For most readers of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas I suspect it’s the excess that enchants. Embarking on a trip to Las Vegas with a head full of bad chemicals was practically a rite of passage for young HST enthusiasts of my generation.

But The Curse of Lono is different.

It has HST’s patented immersion journalism, but it also includes illustrations from and letters to Ralph Steadman as well as excerpts from Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, Richard Hough’s The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook, and The Journal of William Ellis, a missionary who traveled extensively in the Sandwich Islands, as they were known after the Earl of Sandwich funded Captain James Cook’s journey to mark the Transit of Venus on the isle of Tahiti in 1778.

In other words there’s history and lore that HST uses as foreshadowing to great effect, and this is what captivated me when I was a young writer. Today we would call it a hybrid narrative.

I was impressed not with HST’s excess, but his research and knowledge, the way he used the English explorer Captain Cook and the Hawai’ian fertility god Lono to enhance his story. (It also didn’t hurt that in 1987 I took a bunch of acid and saw HST do one of his “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl” talks in San Diego.)

Anyway, I loved the idea that these mythological figures out of the past could be brought to thunderous life in a chiaroscuro of fact and fiction, making a mundane story about a marathon both deeply personal and shockingly strange.

Scenes from the Kona Inn

Rereading The Curse of Lono I was less impressed with the book than I’d been the first time around, but I could see HST’s influence on my own approach to narrative nonfiction. While I don’t insert myself into the stories I write for the LA Times and other outlets, I certainly do in my columns for Razorcake and in newsletters for Message from the Underworld. My agenda may no longer involve drugs and alcohol, but there’s always another layer to the narrative, another angle I’m exploring, to elevate the experience so that I’m not simply covering a band or interviewing a writer.

“Journalism is a Ticket to Ride,” HST writes, “to get involved in the same news that other people watch on TV—which is nice, but won’t pay the rent, and people who can’t pay their rent in the Eighties are going to be in trouble. We are into a very nasty decade, a brutal Darwinian crunch that will not be a happy time for free-lancers.”

Well, HST was right about that, and the situation has only gotten worse in our current “very nasty decade” as the entire print media ecosystem teeters on collapse.

When I tell someone I’m working on a book or writing a piece for the paper, doors open that would normally stay closed. People open up, and that’s exciting. With the right approach, it can turn an ordinary assignment into an adventure. This access is addicting, which HST knew all too well.

“There is action, and action is an easy thing to get hooked on.”

But I feel like this approach is something that a lot of writers and editors have forsaken after COVID, and that younger writers are deliberately opting out of. Why travel across the city/state/planet to interview someone when you can set up a meeting on Zoom?

Because that’s where the action is, that’s when adventure happens. Not being able to log into your meeting or share a screen with a colleague isn’t an adventure, but running out of gas, stopping for a coffee, or killing time at a bar before the gig often is. It’s all part of the mix, or can be anyway, but you have to insert yourself into the story.

I was trying to explain all this to Nuvia while we waited to be served at the crowded bar at the Kona Inn, which was HST’s unofficial headquarters during his time on Hawai’i. A local woman celebrating her 40^th birthday presented all of her guests with flowers to wear in their hair. They were all beautifully dressed in traditional garb and drinking heavily, but not as heavily as the trio of men on the other side of the bar who were eyeing the women and downing cocktails as fast as the bartender could make them. One of them was wearing stiff blue overalls and was becoming louder by the second while out on the lawn one of the servers lit tiki torches as the last of the sunlight dissipated into the Pacific. Time was becoming as loopy and rubbery as a lei made with fake flowers and it felt like violence could spill out of the bar and onto the torchlit lawn at any moment…

(See how much fun it is to lean into HST’s style of storytelling? He doesn’t just set the scene he turns it up to 11 and then sets his chaos agents loose in it.)

The Curse of Lono hasn’t aged particularly well. HST is adept at painting someone as a terrible person who says and does terrible things. Then in the next scene they’re friends. Whenever I read one of HST’s books for the second time, I can see the seams in the narrative, how it was cobbled together from different pieces to create a larger more-or-less cohesive work. But HST was right about one thing: Captain Cook was a tourist with a taste for bloodshed who got what he had coming to him.

I’m currently reading a book about Cook’s career as a mariner so perhaps my opinion on that will change, but I kind of doubt it.

I’m fairly certain there’s one thing the English explorer and the gonzo journalist would have agreed upon: they both would have fucking hated Zoom.

Be careful where you stick your neck out, Jimmy

Thanks for reading. Today is a good day to upgrade to a paid subscription. If you liked this newsletter you might also like my latest novel about healthcare vigilantes Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. I have more books and zines for sale here. And if you’ve read all of those, consider checking out my latest collaboration The Witch’s Door and the anthology Eight Very Bad Nights.

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