Hunter Thompson’s son Juan recalls growing up with a gonzo dad

Hunter S. Thompson was ashamed of his destructive habits, fuelled by drugs and fame, says his son. ‘But he couldn’t stop.’

CineVegas Film Festival 2003 - Screening Of "Breakfast With Hunter"

The bullet he had chosen was fully jacketed and copper-tipped — designed not simply to injure a person but to speed cleanly right through them.

Juan Thompson is describing the bullet that killed his father, writer Hunter S. Thompson, shot from a .45 semiautomatic pistol that Thompson had given Juan to clean the night before. Father (genius writer, famous alcoholic, malicious, highly intelligent, egomaniacal, charming, revolutionary, bully, womaniser, addict, the kind of insane, once-in-a-lifetime iconoclast whose behavioural extremes in later life begin to eclipse the achievements of his youth) and son (introverted, happily married computer nerd) couldn’t have been more opposite. Cleaning Hunter’s gun collection was a way for them to connect.

By the standards of the Thompson family it had been a peaceful weekend. Saturday was an all-nighter during which father and son talked and watched films. It had been a cosy evening, notwithstanding Hunter’s steady consumption of cigarettes, whisky and 7g of cocaine.

The horror of years gone by — most of 42-year-old Juan’s life, in fact — the hatred and terror of his father, his own terrible, not unrelated lack of confidence, had, with the birth of Juan’s son Will, slowly been resolved.

On the Sunday morning, Juan’s wife, Jennifer, and six-year-old Will went out into the Colorado snow, sledding. They returned to play 20 questions in the living room. Juan and his father had been talking in the study. Some time that afternoon Juan briefly left his father to go and do something in the office. He barely registered the thud of what sounded like a book falling to the floor.

His father had shot himself, fallen forward in his armchair, blood trickling from his nose. No note, contrary to rumour. Thank god it hadn’t been little Will who had found him. Within three hours Hunter’s suicide was making headlines.

That was nine years ago. It has taken that long for Juan to write his arresting memoir on the relationship with his troubled, tyrannical father.

“I’m not angry at Hunter very often about his suicide,” he says. “I am angry, though, that he did not stay around for Will.”

Research for the book required long days spent sifting through archives. Juan dug up reporter’s notepads, letters from 25 years ago and a lifetime of bounced cheques. He had forgotten about a desperate letter he had written to his father from boarding school in his teens and here it was — his father had annotated it, jeering that perhaps his son was gay. “Isn’t that odd? I just could not understand how he could be so clueless and unsympathetic, but at the same time I had found other letters: how he was trying to raise money so I could go to college but didn’t want me to know so that I wouldn’t worry about it.

“I think,” says Juan, “it was important to be a good person, but he just couldn’t be. And I don’t think drugs, alcohol or fame helped. It only encouraged his narcissism.” However, he adds: “I really think he was aware of the harm he did and I think he was ashamed of it, but he couldn’t stop it.” In his early 20s, Juan had started to attend 12-step meetings for people affected by alcoholism.

A 51-year-old computer programmer, Juan describes himself as “a nerd”. We are sitting in a cafe in the small town of Boulder, Colorado, where 20-odd years ago he started those 12-step meetings. Polite, cautious and kind, he has no idea his book is as good as it is.

He describes the dreadful, shocking cruelty and drug-blighted events of his childhood with candour but no trace of bitterness. Hunter was 27, broke and living with his new wife, Sandy, in an unheated shack when Juan was born. The year was 1964. “He’d met my mother in New York. They didn’t take it slow.”

Juan’s book includes pictures of himself as a child with his father, a chubby boy beside a lean, tall and stern-looking man; Hunter isn’t smiling in any of them. “He looks quite serious, right? Hunter was so conscious of his persona long before he ever became successful. I think he wanted to be seen as a serious writer and serious writers don’t make toothy smiles in snapshots. When Fear and Loathing (in Las Vegas)came along, he took on a different persona.” Juan remembers a note-to-self his father had taped above his desk: “ ‘What is the Desired Effect?’ — and I think he was always thinking that.”

He says: “Writing was a vocation, not an occupation. Drugs, family, lovers, friends, sex, adventure — they all came after writing.” The same rule applied to Juan. Success came quickly for Hunter: a succession of three hit books, Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Rum Diary, cemented his reputation as a pioneer of a new kind of writing, gonzo journalism, which sharply diverted American literature on to a truer and more surreal path. His disgusted profile of Richard Nixon helped to fuel a political rebellion among a disillusioned generation.

“I think it’s that they just didn’t understand, as parents, the impact of what they were doing — and part of that was the era. There were lots of drugs in Aspen,” Juan recalls. It is now a chic skiing resort, “but Aspen in the 70s was a place where a lot of people who were part of the 60s counterculture came to. And they brought drugs with them, and drugs were not considered bad. And so the idea of parents or their kids doing drugs — I think a lot of them just didn’t think it was odd.”

Aged 14, Juan took his first trip with his mother. As a parent, it’s unthinkable to him now. “It was like giving your 14-year-old son an espresso: ‘Well it’s not something you want to do regularly, but it’s not going to do any harm — right?’ I think they would have been much more upset about smoking — ‘it’s bad for your health’ — but LSD, pot, cocaine was just rampant. Nitrous oxide, ludes … they saw no harm in their children taking them.” Compared with some of the other men in town, Hunter held his booze well.

Juan remembers bell bottoms, peasant shirts, long hair and beards; rolling joints for his parents when he was 11; adults scrambling for white powder on the floor. “It’s odd. On one hand I think kids who grew up in Aspen felt this superiority to these normal kids but it was attractive too because it was calm, predictable. Watching The Brady Bunch, you’d think: ‘They don’t have this crazy stuff going on. They have minor problems.’ ”

Hunter came from a middle-class family in Kentucky. He chose Juan as a name for his son because it wasn’t in his family tree, as well as being a tip to JFK, whom he admired hugely. The five years leading up to Juan’s 13th birthday were “the worst in my life”, Juan says. Sandy and Hunter’s marriage was falling apart because of money shortages, his temperament and their drinking.

Juan describes a spiteful and frightening father from whom he “hid like a dog that had crapped on a rug”. He describes his father’s “controlled and directed insults and rebukes”. By 1976, arguments between his parents were like “outright war in the middle of the night”. He’d watch his father enraged, his mother sobbing and screaming, so furious and terrified that it was impossible to understand what she was saying. “His retaliation would be massive and without mercy.” For instance, breaking things that were sentimentally significant to his mother.

The next day, evidence of his parents’ fights would litter the floor — the remains of a water­melon, plates of food and glasses. His father was “evil”, full of malice, “with a combination of deliberate distortions and carefully chosen words that would inflict maximum hurt, along with his deep and powerful voice, he crushed her”. When Sandy called the police, Hunter would send them away with charming assurances. When she finally left, with Juan, it was with a police escort. Hunter burned her stuff in the yard.

Generously, Juan now interprets a lot of his father’s behaviour as “bluster and noise”. It was only with the birth of Will, when Juan was in his 30s, that two things became clear to him: first, his father must have loved him unconditionally and, second, his parents had been unforgivably irresponsible. (For example, when Juan was one his father took him to a party hosted by novelist Ken Kesey, a druggy, chaotic event where a woman was gang-raped by a group of Hell’s Angels Hunter had invited.)

It’s not surprising that Juan lacked self-confidence. Yet he says, “It was difficult for him to understand how to deal with me because he didn’t understand the social awkwardness (and) not having a clear drive — he knew that he wanted to be a writer from when he was 13.”

The son felt the same incomprehension about his father. “LSD: he really liked it. That’s something I really can’t relate to. Why would you want to push your sense of reality to the edge?”

Juan was in high school when he first read one of his father’s books: Hell’s Angels. “It was just a really good book, but I was also ­really attracted to that persona — ‘Oh gosh, I’d like to be like that’ — while realising this is not me. Especially at 14 or 15 — it’s a tough time for anyone. I was not OK being my introverted, nerdy self.”

Meanwhile, his father was getting more famous and more weird; an “honorary night manager” of a porn cinema, he gave teenage Juan the tour. It was annoying that Juan’s classmates always wanted to know about “how cool it was to grow up with Hunter S. Thompson”, he says. “And yet it’s so terribly important to me to believe I didn’t let him down.”

By the turn of the century Hunter was deteriorating. There was a hip replacement and a brief coma when, during surgery, he suffered withdrawal symptoms from alcohol. “He’d always made it clear that when he died, it was going to be by his own hand,” Juan says.

He was 67. Why did he kill himself on the day he did in February 2005, among Juan’s young family, when his grandson might have discovered his body? Juan thinks his father decided the night before. He had made a strange comment to six-year-old Will: “Do you know the difference between murder and suicide?”

“I think he chose that time because he really felt loved and accepted by me, my wife, my son. And part of it was he wanted me to find his body and take care of things. He couldn’t write, his body was disintegrating, he was in a very unhappy marriage and there were no solutions.”

It was a characteristically selfish act, followed by international hysteria, primarily mourning the passing of Hunter’s “wild man” persona. It made Juan want to write a truer account.

“Some of it isn’t pretty, and I’d think, ‘Would Hunter want me to talk about this?’ And I had a really strong feeling: just tell the truth. I really think he would have been disappointed if I had excluded the negatives.”

The Times

Stories I Tell Myself: Growing Up with Hunter S. Thompson, by Juan F. Thompson, is published by Knopf.