He wasn’t a Raoul Duke character.” That’s his drug-snorting alter ego, the name he gives himself in Fear and Loathing. When I met him, he wasn’t a wild partier. I knew him as Hunter before I knew him as a writer. “I was 25 and I had an instant crush on him,” she says. In truth, they were introduced by a mutual friend: she had a question about football and the friend thought Thompson, then primarily a sportswriter, would know the answer. At least, that’s the way he tells it in his sort-of memoir Kingdom of Fear, published in 2003. She met Thompson in 1997, when he saved her from being mauled by a pair of crazed great danes on the boardwalk of Venice Beach in LA. He did have a way of consuming more food, more alcohol and more drugs than anybody I’ve ever seen Indeed, the whole room is largely unchanged, part of Anita’s plans to preserve the home as a museum. Another typewriter remains where he left it, engulfed in a snowdrift of books and papers. In the afternoon, Anita shows me around their home, including the kitchen that was once his “command centre”. While sitting at the typewriter, I glance out the window and see a lone white-tailed deer standing on the ridge just above Thompson’s cherry-red Pontiac Grand Ville. There is, I realise now, a certain irony to the fact that a journey beginning with that debauched and hallucinatory tale has brought me to one of the most serene and peaceful places I’ve been. Like many, my gateway drug was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his vicious satirical broadside against the American dream that begins with the line: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” It was reading Thompson as a teenager that made me want to write for a living. Walking there during the day, I found myself lulled into a state of meditation. It now marks the heart of a labyrinth, picked out in red rocks that were placed there by Anita several years ago. There is still a piece of rebar buried in the ground where the tower once stood. The command centre … Kevin EG Perry with Anita Thompson at Owl Farm. Johnny Depp, who played Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, picked up the $3m tab for that elaborate sendoff, which took place shortly after Thompson killed himself in 2005. A short walk uphill is the spot where Thompson’s ashes were fired into the sky from a 153ft tower in the shape of a “Gonzo fist”, a logo he first adopted during his unsuccessful 1970 campaign to be sheriff of nearby Aspen. It sits beside the main Thompson home on a 17-hectare estate marked with hoof prints and elk droppings that gradually rises towards a mountain range. In April, Thompson’s widow, Anita, began renting out the writer’s cabin to help support the Hunter S Thompson scholarship for veterans at Columbia University, where both she and Hunter studied. The only sound anywhere is the warm hum of this electric typewriter and the mechanical rhythm of its key strikes, as clear and certain as gunfire. Even the peacocks he raised are sleeping. Owl Farm, Thompson’s “fortified compound” in Woody Creek, Colorado, is dark and silent outside. I t is 4.30 on a Thursday morning and I am writing these words on the big red IBM Selectric III that once belonged to Hunter S Thompson.
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