Gonzo Report: Hunting for Hunter S. Thompson at La Jolla Playhouse

In my youthful and more formidable years, I typed out Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas line for line, chapter by chapter, just as the original gonzo journalist did with The Great Gatsby. The idea behind the practice is to help a writer “feel the music” of another author’s masterpiece. In other words, it was a way to get inside the writer’s mind, an attempt to get a sense of what the fuck was going on in there as they wrote. Let’s take the ride.

From outside the Che Café, en route to the La Jolla Playhouse, I texted Neekol and told her to park in the parking structure just off the Theatre District. In a display of unabashed spontaneity, she’d bought a ticket a couple hours before this performance of the Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical kicked off. Seconds later, I heard somebody from a gray Toyota shout “Hey!” It was Neekol. She pulled up next to me and I hopped in the passenger seat.

“I just texted you,” I said. “We have to park in the parking structure. I just ate a couple grams of cacao mushrooms. I have more if you want some.” She gracefully declined, saying she was taking it easy on the psychedelics after dancing with ayahuasca a couple nights before. “Say less,” I accepted. But, for me, there’s no way I could ever cover anything about Hunter S. Thompson without being in the right psychedelic mindset. It was a mandatory dosing. I needed to feel the music. (Spoiler alert: this one ends with a bang.)

As we walked towards the Playhouse, I spotted a fellow Reader writer, the Brown Buffalo Gabe Garcia, grazing outside the ticket office. I approached the sales window with my fellow Gonzo reporter and Neekol. “Where do we go for the press passes?” I asked the attendant. He stood up from behind the window and pointed over to the theater entrance. “You have to find Becky,” he said. “I think she’s over there.” I looked over and saw a woman with too many papers in her arms. Why did she have so many papers? It must be Becky. It was Becky. She handed me two tickets and introduced me to her son, whose name was something like Ian or Darren. “All the other press information is in the email I sent you,” she informed me. I politely grinned and we moved along to find our seats.

Possibly thanks to the butterfly relic she keeps tucked in the pocket of her blue denim jacket, Neekol was able to secure a front row ticket dead center. “It’s in spitting distance,” a jovial usher told her. Meanwhile, Gabe and I were somewhere in the middle of a packed house. The mushrooms began to grip as I looked at a stage detailed to look identical to Hunter S. Thompson’s office/kitchen on his Owl Farm compound. The dead buck’s head trophies on the wood-paneled wall were beginning to breathe, exhaling their moist mushroom breath on the ‘70s-era couches, the typewriter sitting on a desk next to a prop pistol, and a bottle of Wild Turkey, it was all getting too real. You could say I was getting the fear.

Neekol looked back at us with the fervency of a carney trying to draw rubes from a crowd. She had two empty seats right next to her. “As your colleague,” said Gabe, “I advise we go down there with her and sit in those seats until somebody kicks us out.” He was right, but did he not see the angry decapitated deer heads on the wall beginning to snort? We clumsily made our way down to Neekol’s row. For the rest of the evening, in what felt like a moment of fate, we sat front row with her, welcoming any actors’ spit that might spray our way.

The musical took us through the life, career, and spectacular ups and downs of the famed outlaw journalist, but its conclusion, of course, was already written. Most know that Thompson’s life ended the same as Hemingway’s, Cobain’s, and the lives of other brilliant generational minds: with a killer bee whizzing through his brain via self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Although the ending was as dark as a November NYC reservoir, the show was somehow still firing on high octane humor, blowing the minds of an audience dressed in vacation flower shirts and funny hats. The spirit of Raoul Duke (Hunter S. Thompson’s alter ego) was behind me, right next to me, up on the stage, in the bathroom, on a cardboard cutout, outside blowing a joe, and most frighteningly, inside me. Yikes.