They may surprise you

I’m reading some of Hunter S Thompson’s collected letters again to help swallow down the bitter pill that the gonzo reservoir is just about dry. Sometimes all it takes is a brief missive from Hunter to a mail ordering company, pointing out how inferior their products are (”If the garbage on this coat is leather, I’ll eat it“), to bring a smile to my face.

The really good stuff though tends to be when Hunter is banging heads with someone who is not scared to call him out.

The relationship between him and Oscar Acosta (portrayed in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as the “300-pound Samoan attorney” Dr Gonzo and played perfectly of course by Benicio del Toro in the Gilliam movie) is a stormy one to say the least. If you don’t own the Criterion DVD of the movie you’re really missing out on a bunch of cool stuff, but perhaps the most interesting extra on there is a look at Acosta, his work and his disappearance.

In an earlier letter Hunter is giving his friend some advice on writing:

Your problem there is that your club hand is dialogue, which used to mean fiction - but if you can teach yourself to use dialogue to tell a topical, non-fiction story you’ll sell it. I guarantee that - but only if you get that goddamn missionary instinct out of your narrative. Let the people tell their own stories; they may surprise you.

There’s a sad line in one letter where Acosta suggests that if they’re still around in the year 2000 maybe they’ll have made a couple of dollars off each other.

Only one of them made it.