There's a book that has been following me.
At Weller's Book Works in Salt Lake City, Utah, I had the pleasure of examining the book in their rare collection. I fell in love with the artistry that famed illustrator Ralph Steadman had contributed to its significance. However, Mr. Weller had a warning: "Don't expect Hunter's writing to amount to anything." As a Hunter S. Thompson fan, I cursed his notion that a published work of Thompson's was anything other than great. The price tag on the book was $400 — a bit out of my price range, so I didn't take it home.
A few months later, Weller's had a pop-up stand at the SLC Airport where the same book was behind a locked case. I was less than hammered from the airport pub, but paranoid enough that the book being in the same terminal as my flight meant something. I studied the book, "Why are you here?" The pop-up bookstore employee came up to me and asked if I wanted to look at it closely. I replied, "Nope. I've seen enough."
As I waited for my flight to board, I found a bootleg PDF file of the book online and began to read it. The Curse of Lono by Hunter S. Thompson, Illustrated by Ralph Steadman. It began as any other HST book. The intro laid the foundation of what's to come: where he was going, what he was supposed to do, and his allusions to what might be the bigger story upon arrival. The build-up was strong — just like any of his others.
I realized this wasn't a book, but a collection of scribbles and notes from Thompson's time in Hawaii. It was clearly written in a manic state of drug-fueled lampooning of Alan Rinzler, the editor of Running Magazine, who had tasked Thompson with writing an article on the 1980 Honolulu Marathon.
As I continued to read, I grew a subtle disdain for anyone letting this book get published. In summary, I felt that Thompson's deranged mind had an idea that he could never fully grasp due to his self-torture and demented treatment of the people around him at the time of writing the book.
I understand that Rinzler had a duty to his publication. They fronted Thompson a large amount of money to give them a strong piece for their niche magazine that could have used a good set of words from an established writer like Thompson. However, I'd like to think he wasn't done. The words that Rinzler forcibly took from Thompson were not ready to see the light of day. According to David S. Wills' book High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism, Rinzler admitted that he had to steal Thompson's manuscript, which was partially written on scraps of paper. Rinzler further explained that the text was hastily assembled and then padded with quotes from other books in order to make it seem more substantial.
The book ended up having a short print time before being pulled for lack of sales. Later in 2005, the book that had been following me was reprinted in a limited 1000 print run. Now it has a smaller hardcover edition available, but it remains, understandably, Thompson's worst-performing book to date.
Something about the lore behind it spoke to me. In a way, I felt like I understood his direction and why he eventually pulled away. After a second read with annotations, I felt that he found another Puerto Rico, but with deeper cultural roots than he was ultimately prepared for. I kept thinking, The Rum Diary worked because he excluded himself and purposefully used other characters to bring the systemic issues to light, whereas in Hawaii, he struggled to make a dent in conveying the other side of life. I wholeheartedly believe that if it weren't for his experience in Hawaii, The Rum Diary would have never been completed. Mind you, The Rum Diary wasn't published until 1998.
The failure of The Curse of Lono caused this obsession to further explore it. Hawaii forced him to see himself as a haole, and he couldn't write himself out of it. Word traveled among the natives about the drunken haole rambling on about the ancient Hawaiian god Lono. I'm sure by 1980, the locals weren't exactly as spiritually inclined as they once were, but they had every reason to find offense to his maniacal outbursts of claiming that he was Lono reincarnated. Thompson was onto something. I think he knew it too, but didn't know what to do with it before it was too late. Maybe he loathed the direction it was going. To him, another anti-colonization and anti-displacement story may have broken him into believing he was becoming some liberal hack.
That's where I come in. I'm not here to worship the trail Thompson left behind. I'm here to translate it into comprehension for everyone else. I want to test the meaning of what it is to be a haole and submit to it. I want to be in the same island bubble of marathon crowds, locals, resort strips, lava fields, drugs, and all — but let the island tell me what it wants to tell me.
My goal isn't to finish that god forsaken book. My purpose here is to make sense of the things Thompson couldn't or wouldn't say — and to give space to the voices he ignored. I believe the challenge is still there, which is to meet the same match, but stay in the ring a little longer.
What's to Come? (Blog Only)
This is my declaration of a new chapter in my life. I didn't want to start it by physically running after another writer's footsteps, but I needed this as some sort of exercise for my storytelling acumen. I realized my lack of care for the pretentious writing community that poisons today's up-and-coming talent. I've overcome and learned this lesson: Embarrassment is an underexplored emotion. Go out there and make a fool of yourself.
"The natives have been waiting for this moment ever since, handing his promise down from one generation to another and faithfully celebrating the memory of their long-lost God/King at the end of each year with a two-week frenzy of wild parties and industrial-strength fireworks. The missionaries did everything in their power to wean the natives away from their faith in what amounted to a kind of long-overdue alter-Christ, and modern politicians have been trying for years to curtail or even ban the annual orgy of fireworks during the Christmas season, but so far, nothing has worked."
- The Curse of Lono, by Hunter S. Thompson
