The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America

by Brian Kevin

  VI

  It is pure speculation on my part, but one final event in February of 1963 may have further jangled Thompson’s nerves and soured him on life in Rio. On the first of that month, about an hour before dawn, Thompson woke to a frantic phone call from a friend. The Army was killing people right outside of a Copacabana nightclub, the voice shouted, at a place called the Domino. The caller was locked inside a nearby club, watching the violence play out in the street. Over his tinny connection, the still-groggy Thompson heard his unnamed friend yelling that he needed to get down to the nightclub district and see what was going on, and he needed to go now.

  The Domino, it turned out, was on the very same cobblestone nightclub strip as the Kilt Club. By the time Thompson pulled up in a cab, the shooting had stopped and the soldiers moved on. The sidewalk was littered with slug casings and broken glass. In front of the club, an unexploded hand grenade lay ominously in the street, and blood pooled on the asphalt where a doorman had been killed. Medics were loading an injured bartender and several patrons into ambulances, and bystanders were still milling about in the road, stunned and inspecting the damage. Thompson walked among them, passing right outside the bar where he liked to drink and talk politics, and his observations formed the basis for a powerful article that the Observer ran ten days later. The headline read DAYBREAK AT THE DOMINO: BRAZILIAN SOLDIERS STAGE A RAID IN REVENGE.

  Rereading the piece in my grungy hostel one afternoon, I just about fell off my bunk when I realized that the Domino Club had also been on tiny Rua Carvalho de Mendonça, just blocks away from where I was sitting. A half hour later, I was back down at the Orgasmo, where the beer-bellied proprietor smiled to see me coming. With help from my Portuguese phrasebook, I managed to ask him whether he knew anything about the story of the ambushed club.

  “Doh-mee-nah, doooh-me-nah,” Dom Orgasmo said, stroking his chin. He shook his head vigorously and stepped out onto the sidewalk, leaving his bar unattended and motioning for me to follow. “Vem comigo,” he said. Come with me.

  The violence at the Domino was a major news story at the time. The renegade soldiers were avenging the death of a sergeant who’d been killed there weeks before, beaten to death when a fight broke out over his bill. “The establishment was completely wrecked,” according to the Brazil Herald’s coverage the next day. The culprits were a “paratrooper detail with blackened faces” who barricaded the street before firing tear gas and machine guns into the crowd. For Brazilians, the shooting at the Domino was an ominous reminder that, more and more, the military was acting with impunity. In retrospect, it seemed to foreshadow the country’s impending military takeover. As Thompson pointed out, “The basic problem is hardly unique to Brazil: Where civil authority is weak and often corrupt, the military gets power by default.”

  Friendly Dom Orgasmo took me up and down the street, asking various shop owners and roustabouts whether they remembered the place. It seemed to strike everyone as vaguely familiar, and each shopkeeper referred us to someone else down the block who might know more. The guy at the hardware store pointed across the street to the liquor-store guy. The liquor-store guy suggested we talk to the kitchen-store owner. The kitchen-store owner’s wife pointed out a balding man with a salt-and-pepper mustache, loitering in front of the Laundromat next to the Orgasmo.

  “Doh-mee-nah?” repeated the mustache man, crinkling his forehead. Then, all at once, his eyes lit up and he let out a rapid stream of unintelligible Portuguese. With his hands, he made the universal double-point-and-shake gesture of a machine gun.

  “That’s right!” I said in English.

  “Exatamente!” Dom Orgasmo said, slapping us both on the back.

  The mustache guy’s name was João, and for the next few minutes, he spoke to me in what must have been painfully slow Portuguese, with a lot of hand gestures and a bit of supplementary Spanish. João was just a boy in 1963, but he lived in an apartment building at the end of the block, and he remembered how the soldiers had closed down both ends of the street. “There and there,” he said, pointing. It was very loud, he said, and he made the machine gun motion several more times. Afterward, he remembered, the block was full of people, all walking around slowly, many of them in shock. How strange, I thought, to know that Hunter S. Thompson had been one of them.

  “And where was it?” I asked, gesturing around at the block.

  João made a humming sound and furrowed his eyebrows. “Definitely on this side of the street,” he said. He was quiet for a minute, looking up and down the block. Then he looked straight at the Orgasmo.

  “I think it was here,” he said, sounding a bit surprised. “Or maybe there,” he added, pointing at the dry cleaner. Or maybe both. It was big, João said, maybe three whole storefronts, but it was definitely right about here.

  I thanked him profusely, and we shook hands before he walked away. What were the odds, I wondered, that of all the bars in Rio de Janeiro, I’d been drinking all week at the former Domino Club without knowing it? I inspected the cobblestones at my feet, half expecting to see crimson bloodstains from the assassinated doorman. My hands were trembling. For a second, I felt uncomfortably engulfed by history, at the center of the relentless, invisible crush of everything that has ever happened.

  I sat back down in the Orgasmo and ordered a Brahma Chopp, thanking the ebullient owner for his help. When I’d finished my beer, he brought me another and waved off my attempts to pay for it. It was, he insisted, a saideira, and he clapped me on the back once more. When he had gone, I looked up the word in my phrasebook. “One for the road,” it meant.

  The road. Hunter S. Thompson was on it for a year, almost to the day, and for him, that was long enough. Not too long after the Domino incident, he started making plans to get out of Rio. He flew to Lima in April, intending at first to pick up the trail once more for the National Observer. He put his girlfriend on a plane to New York, and he planned to meet her there after a long swing back through the Andes and into Central America. With his editor, he discussed story ideas about the Panama Canal, earthquakes in Costa Rica, and communism in Baja. But his heart wasn’t in it, and he told his editor as much. Latin America was burning him out, and he was eager to turn his attention to the United States.

  “We will have to get together on my return,” he wrote to the editor, “so I can tell you how I’m going to write what America means.”

  Then, in Lima, arguably his least favorite city on the continent, Thompson snapped. By then, he was stone broke again—in debt to the Observer, in fact, which had been paying in advance for articles he hadn’t yet written. His and Sandy’s plane tickets had sapped him dry. The jackboots were still running the show in Peru, where a new general had overthrown the old general who’d invalidated the election the year before. What’s more, Lima’s winter fog was settling in, heralding a six-month end to sunshine in the City of Kings. “I wish to jesus I had never seen this continent,” Thompson wrote on April 28.

  The next day, he wrote his editor again, describing a total meltdown—“violent shouting, destruction, tears, the whole works.” Was he exaggerating? There is no way to know. What is certain is that Thompson was back in New York within days.

  And this is the way the Hunter S. Thompson Trail ends: not with a bang but a whimper.

  My last day in South America was simple and beautiful. I woke up at Rio’s cheapest hostel to find little trios of bite marks decorating my hands and forehead, a telltale sign of bedbugs. So that part wasn’t great. But it was sunny and it was Saturday, when the Cariocas traditionally prepare the slow-cooked bean, beef, and pork stew they call feijoada. All over Copacabana, sidewalk diners were camped out at large tables with their families and friends, enjoying multi-hour lunches of the rich, heavy dish. I picked a café where they served me a giant, steaming crock of it, with sides of clingy white rice, fragrant collard greens, and orange slices. Next to my plate, the waiter set a dish of bright red hot sauce and a shot of cachaça rum—to settle the stomach, I suppose. I
ate in a perfectly contented silence for almost two hours, shamelessly ogling the beautiful people of Rio de Janeiro.

  In the afternoon, I strolled the beach, and before sunset, I set out to hike up Morro da Urca, the smaller wooded hill that rises in front of Rio’s famous Sugarloaf Mountain. After Machu Picchu, the oblong haystack of Sugarloaf may be the continent’s most recognizable landmark, a dramatic rock set idyllically against the Rio cityscape and the perfect blue of Guanabara Bay. From Morro da Urca, a cable car runs to the top, and I crammed inside with forty other camera-toting tourists to take in the famed sunset views.

  They did not disappoint. Rio’s nickname is “o Cidade Maravilhosa” (the Marvelous City), and it really is a marvel how the sparkling disarray of the metro weaves itself in and around the green curves of the coastal mountains. The city spills like a flood out of every open valley and creeps up tentatively into the gentler folds between hillsides. As the sun sank behind the hills, the horizontal light stretched out across the bay, where a surging mob of white apartment towers stops short against the coastline. On a twin butte opposite Sugarloaf stood Christ the Redeemer, whose arms never close, looking down over the whole weird mess.

  I stood there for a while, poised on the edge of the continent and looking back. Then, as the sun’s last rays disappeared, I shuffled with the rest of the crowd back into the cable car. A bossa nova trio had started up at the patio café on Morro da Urca, and the music drifted across the hillside like a warm breeze. I sat down, ordered a caipirinha, and stared out across the city of Rio, just another thirsty foreigner looking for the good life.

  EPILOGUE

  Un Paseño

  Back in the low-barometer loony bin that is La Paz, the local beer of choice is a pale golden lager called Paceña, which they brew up there at 12,000 feet and sell in the tall liter bottles that I’m accustomed to calling “bombers.” One night at the hostel, my twentysomething German roommate had offered me a pull from the bottle he was nursing. It wasn’t too bad, he said, and he added that he was Bavarian, so he should know. Did I want to know the etymology of the brand name?

  “It comes from the word pasado,” he said sagely, displaying the label to me like a waiter with a fine Bordeaux. “This is Spanish for ‘the past,’ you see. So a paceña is a person who is tied to the past, yes? Or a person who is obsessed with the past, someone who is living in it.”

  That sounded muy romantico, I said, and I thanked him for the swig. Unfortunately, this is a bullshit explanation. Like beers all across Bolivia, Paceña takes its name from the demonym for its hometown—a paceño or a paceña is simply a citizen of sky-high La Paz. Likewise, the Santa Cruz–dwellers are called cruceños, and Cruceña is their beloved local brew. Down in Potosí, it’s warm cans of Potosina that all those miners are tipping back underground.

  Still, I think the young Bavarian was on to something, and I kind of wish his definition were true. The closest word for what he was describing would probably be paseño, a made-up piece of pseudo-Spanish that nonetheless pretty nicely describes what I felt like during my six months of travel in South America. I was a wandering paseño, with one foot in the here and now and another alongside Hunter Thompson in the early ’60s.

  I am increasingly convinced that this is the only way to travel. Maybe the only way to live. Another famous paseño, Thompson’s hero William Faulkner, probably put it best when he wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” South America is a full-on, sensory manifestation of this idea, its historical sites both durable and distinct, presenting travelers with regular, visual reminders that the consequences of what happened yesterday are still acting on us today. Of course, this is equally true in the absence of pre-Columbian ruins or the colorful ziggurats of the conquistadors. The people and ideas and events of history are not something we can pave over or leave behind. They are always right there with us, even if only we real good paseños can see them.

  If the Hunter S. Thompson Trail traces the author’s ideological journey as much as his geographic one, then in a sense, its real terminus isn’t Rio de Janeiro but a spot on Elm Street in downtown Dallas, in front of the former Texas School Book Depository. I visited the city a few months after I came home from South America, and I spent a quiet Sunday afternoon there wandering the grassy Dealey Plaza and the surrounding landmarks associated with the Kennedy assassination.

  The president’s murder in November of 1963 served as a kind of coda to Thompson’s evolution from budding novelist and rebel without a cause to acerbic, hard-charging journalist. Kennedy was the closest thing to a travel companion that Thompson had in South America. Nearly all of his Observer stories from the continent at least mentioned the president, and half of them dealt directly with fallout from Kennedy’s foreign policy. It wasn’t a set of policies that Thompson always agreed with, but in Kennedy he saw a striver, a bulwark against both the warmongers and the golf-balls-off-the-balcony mentality of greed and indifference. The assassination, he wrote, was “a triumph of lunacy, of rottenness … the death of reason.” It validated the dread that had crept up on him all across South America, that gnawing sense that the deck was stacked against the strivers.

  Life moved pretty quickly for Thompson after he got back to the States. In May, he was invited to speak at the National Press Club in DC about his Observer reportage, which had turned some heads among American media bigwigs. By the end of the month, he and Sandy were married. By August, he was considering writing a book on Latin American politics—an idea sadly abandoned—and by September, he and Sandy had moved to Woody Creek, Colorado, a rural enclave outside Aspen. Thompson would call Woody Creek home for the remaining forty-two years of his life.

  Then, on November 22, Thompson heard from a neighbor that Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas. He immediately went into Aspen, where there was radio and TV, and that night, he wrote to his friend and fellow author William Kennedy. He was done with fiction, he said, done with nostalgia for the days of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. For the foreseeable future, politics and social struggle were the only things that mattered. Describing his disgust at the assassination, Thompson coined what would become his trademark phrase. “There is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything,” he wrote, “much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today’s murder.”

  As I walked through Dealey Plaza, a man with a megaphone shouted at passersby, urging them to board a bright red “JFK Assassination Trolley.” Dads with camera phones posed their kids like snipers on top of the grassy knoll. The marquee ticket, though, is the museum on the sixth floor of the old depository, where an exhibit pathway leads visitors past the window from which Lee Harvey Oswald fired down into the president’s convertible. I bought a $16 ticket from a grandmotherly attendant who twice called me “sugar,” and I rode the elevator up with a troop of camera-toting Chinese tourists.

  The first third of the exhibit recaps Kennedy’s three years in office. I looked around until I found a black-and-white photo of the president in Bogotá in 1961, posing at a cornerstone-dedication ceremony on the edge of the city. He’s grinning at a crowd of onlookers and TV cameras, unveiling a plaque at the future site of an Alliance-funded housing project called Ciudad Techo—soon to be renamed Ciudad Kennedy, in memoriam. Jackie stands off to the side in her pea coat and pillbox hat, and the backdrop is a jagged tableau of forested peaks. It made me nostalgic for Colombia.

  The text accompanying the image mentions the success of the Peace Corps, then offers a short, blunt assessment of the Latin American development plan that Thompson traveled so many miles to cover: “The Alianza para el Progreso, a massive ten-year economic and social program for Latin America, was less successful and did not live up to expectations.”

  Today, historians widely consider the Alliance to have been a flop. It limped along for another decade after Kennedy, doing little to curb poverty and mostly serving to shore up US-friendly, anti-communist governments. In fact, looking back on my time along the T
hompson Trail, it’s hard to ignore just how much of South America today seems to represent exactly those scenarios that the US policies of Thompson’s day had been drawn up to prevent. The populist left now has a firm foothold on the continent. The poorest haven’t much improved their lot. And a not-small percentage of the populace still views the United States with a kind of weary, conflicted resentment.

  Still, what you don’t find in South America is the resulting nightmare scenario that many in Thompson’s era might have predicted. Had you described to officials in the Kennedy administration, for instance, a Brazil led for twelve years by a popular unionist and a former left-wing militant, they would probably have gone into fits. But far from being a downtrodden socialist dystopia, Brazil has one of the continent’s strongest democracies—and one of the world’s largest and most decidedly capitalist economies.

  Despite the slums and the favelas and the hard-luck villages, the South America that I saw only spottily resembled the bleak, dependent purgatory that Thompson often described. What I found instead was a vibrant and endlessly striving continent, proud of its identity and working to meet its own challenges. Is it chaotic? Yes. Drastically unequal? Absolutely. Is it sometimes economically unstable and other times plagued by seemingly overwhelming ideological conflict? Yes and yes again.

  But I can think of at least one other sprawling society that fits every one of these descriptions. In fact, it’s ironic to suppose that in many ways, the United States has probably become more like South America in the last fifty years than South America has become like the United States.

  Thompson left the continent—fled it, really—with a sense of dark foreboding. But beneath all that frustration and cynicism, he seemed to have retained a few kernels of optimism for both continents. A couple of months in the United States helped to calm him down. Returning to the American West, he later wrote, gave him “a sense of renewing,” and he wrote to his editor that, despite his criticisms of the Alliance, he believed the program’s ideals were still obtainable. The United States and Latin America could still work together to foster peace, fight poverty, and ensure dignity across the hemisphere, Thompson said, but only if the United States avoided paternalism and self-interest, “only so far as we believe in ourselves, and only as long as we keep proving, over and over again, that we are not as mean and greedy as were our forefathers.”