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

  Praise for THE FOOTLOOSE AMERICAN

  “Brian Kevin has written a marvelous travel romp following the Proud Highway of Hunter S. Thompson through Latin America. Kevin is a helluva good writer, and if the Gonzo King were alive he would give The Footloose American a thumbs up.”

  —DOUGLAS BRINKLEY,

  author of Cronkite, CBS News historian, and literary executor of Hunter S. Thompson’s estate

  “Brian Kevin has achieved a miraculous first with this brilliant travelogue that follows Hunter S. Thompson’s journeys through South America shot into the prism of the modern traveler’s aesthetic. The vividness of Kevin’s writing makes for great reading, and his stories bring to life the immediacy and romantic allure of the Latin experience.”

  —ANDREW ZIMMERN,

  creator of Bizarre Foods on the Travel Channel

  “Brian Kevin’s journey through South America in the footsteps of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson is a tour de force. He has brought back a wonderful kaleidoscope of unforgettable characters and keen insight, wrapped in frequent moments of hilarity. This is the work of a first-class writer from whom we will be hearing a lot more in the years ahead. I look forward to every page.”

  —SCOTT WALLACE,

  author of The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes

  “Is there a point to another ‘in the footsteps’ narrative? Emphatically yes. Brian Kevin’s decision to follow the journey that created the perspective of one of the seminal writers of our time, Hunter S. Thompson, does more than offer a needed understanding of Thompson’s origins. Kevin’s journey through South America reconsiders what it means to be a journalist, a traveler, a gringo, and an American. Plus, it’s a great travel narrative on its own.”

  —SCOTT HULER,

  author of On the Grid and No-Man’s Lands

  “In this meticulously rendered quest, Brian Kevin reveals that before the screeching bats and blood-sucking lizards, Hunter S. Thompson was an earnest, quixotic—even innocent—young writer trying to learn how the world worked. The Footloose American illuminates how Thompson’s sharp eye for truth, honed on the back roads and in the back rooms of South America, would soon fall on fissures in his own country as they cracked wide open in fear and loathing.”

  —MARK SUNDEEN,

  author of The Man Who Quit Money

  Copyright © 2014 by Brian Kevin

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, B D W Y, are trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Chapter two previously appeared in abridged form as “After the Time of Cholera” in Wend magazine (September 2010).

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Villard Books for permission to reprint an excerpt from The Proud Highway by Hunter S. Thompson. Copyright © 1997 by Hunter S. Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kevin, Brian.

  The footloose American : following the Hunter S. Thompson trail across South America / Brian Kevin.

  1. South America—Description and travel. 2. South America—Politics and government. 3. South America—Social conditions. 4. Indians of South America—Social conditions. 5. Thompson, Hunter S.—Travel—South America. 6. Kevin, Brian—Travel—South America. I. Title. F2225.K48 2014

  980—dc23 2013038287

  ISBN 978-0-7704-3637-7

  eBook ISBN 978-0-7704-3638-4

  Map by Joe LeMonnier

  Cover design by Cardon Webb

  Cover photographs: (top) courtesy of the Hunter S. Thompson Collection

  © The Estate of Hunter S. Thompson, used by permission of The Wylie

  Agency LLC; (bottom) Bruno Fert/Picturetank

  Author photograph: Jamil Roberts

  v3.1

  To Elsa,

  who moved the whole house while I was away

  Contents

  Cover

  Map

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Weekend at Bernie’s

  Chapter Two: After the Time of Cholera

  Chapter Three: Sex, Violence, and Golf

  Chapter Four: Gringolandia

  Chapter Five: His Once-Great Empire

  Chapter Six: Notes from Underground

  Chapter Seven: Hope for the Mato Grosso

  Chapter Eight: An Unaffected American

  Chapter Nine: One for the Road

  Epilogue: Un Paseño

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER ONE

  Weekend at Bernie’s

  As I came over the brink of the cliff, a few children laughed, an old hag began screeching, and the men just stared. Here was a white man with 12 Yankee dollars in his pocket and more than $500 worth of camera gear slung over his shoulders, hauling a typewriter, grinning, sweating, no hope of speaking the language, no place to stay—and somehow they were going to have to deal with me.

  —National Observer, August 6, 1962

  I

  The moment that South America first became real to me, I was tearing across the roadless desert in the back of a jostling beer truck. Exhaust fumes hung heavy on the air. Mirage ponds quivered in the distance. From the truck’s shuddering chassis, a blast beat echoed across the flats, muffling the clink of contraband bottles, a death-metal soundtrack to the rawbone panorama of sand and sky.

  We were crossing the Guajira Peninsula, a desolate nubbin of yellow dirt that juts like a fist off the very top of South America. Until that moment, it had all been prologue, the familiar rites and venues of an orderly arrival abroad: customs lines and cab stands, sterile hotel hallways, clumsy introductions in an unfamiliar tongue. Now the Colombian outback was screaming past me on both sides, hazy behind a sandstorm of our own making. With every turn, the photographer and I braced, clinging tightly to the truck-bed’s wooden rails, holding on to keep from being thrown onto the flats.

  This felt real because it felt dangerous, I thought. And fairly or unfairly, danger was what I’d come to Colombia expecting to find.

  At the wheel of the truck was Bernie José, the jovial, elfin proprietor of a nameless pool hall in a remote Colombian fishing village called Cabo de la Vela. Bernie, for the moment, was my guide. Together with my photographer companion, I was crouched in the back of Bernie’s pickup truck, surrounded by twenty-one cases of Venezuelan beer that clattered as we roared past cactus clusters and thatched-roof homesteads. Before we’d set out that morning, Bernie had dolefully recalled for us the day he’d flipped his truck while driving across a dry riverbed, breaking a leg and permanently disfiguring his passenger in the process. Now he waved at us periodically in the rearview mirror, flashing a grin and a thumbs-up whenever we hit a particularly kidney-rattling bump.

  In 1962, the American writer Hunter S. Thompson described a similar ride across the peninsula as “punishing both truck and passengers unmercifully.” Thompson would later become known for his fondness for hyperbole, for liberally sprinkling his prose with adjectives like “savage,” “brutal,” “terrible,” and “fearsome.” In this instance, though, his description seemed apt. Truck suspensions have come a long way in the last fifty years, and yet each t
ime Bernie’s Toyota walloped the dry, packed earth, I found myself wondering how my own whiplash must have compared to Thompson’s.

  Hunter S. Thompson was a young and decidedly unknown reporter in 1962. He had come to Guajira in search of smugglers, researching a story for an American newspaper about the region’s brisk trade in bootlegged goods. I, in turn, had come to Guajira in search of Thompson. The smugglers I encountered more or less by accident.

  Seventy-two hours earlier, I had stepped off a plane in Barranquilla, a jumbled Colombian metro on the country’s muggy Atlantic coast, only to find that I had no baggage. It was a double-whammy of arrival shock. To a denizen of the dry Montana Rockies, stepping out of the airport into coastal Colombia is like getting bludgeoned with a sack of wet laundry. The equatorial humidity is just so complete, the saturation so overwhelming, that the lungs simply give out on you, withering in the swelter like damp paper bags. As I’d staggered out of the passenger terminal, trying hard to jumpstart my jangled respiratory system, I had studied the slip of paper handed me inside. On it was a phone number, a hotline to call in order to find out whether the one small rucksack I’d packed for my six-month journey across the continent might eventually be located. Naturally, my luggage had been lost, because this is how all good trips begin—with adversity.

  Hunter S. Thompson had it worse. In May of 1962, on the eve of a yearlong hitch across the continent, he described his circumstances grimly in a letter to a friend. “My situation is as follows,” he began.

  I am in Aruba with $30. Tomorrow afternoon I have a free ride to Colombia, aboard a small sloop that will also carry a load of contraband whiskey. I may be in jail within 48 hours—a Colombian jail. If I get to Barranquilla, my goal, I will have no more than $5; what happens then is up to god.

  By comparison, my situation was cushy. For starters, I was already in Colombia, and getting there had been easy-bordering-on-impulsive. Some months earlier, I’d sat in front of a laptop in my local coffee shop in Missoula, Montana, feeling listless and depressingly bourgeois. I was twenty-nine years old and functionally unemployed, recently divorced, and more recently awarded a flimsy master’s degree in the humanities. On something like a whim, I’d traded a few years’ worth of airline miles for a ticket to a country that I associated mostly with drug kingpins and guerrilla armies. It took about ten minutes, six mouse clicks, and zero smugglers’ boats.

  Upon my arrival in Barranquilla, I had several hundred dollars and only a vague itinerary. In the absence of my rucksack, I also had the clothes on my back, a half dozen Nature Valley granola bars, and one dog-eared copy of The Proud Highway, Thompson’s first volume of collected correspondence.

  Like a lot of people my age, I first encountered Hunter Thompson via director Terry Gilliam’s 1998 film adaptation of his most popular book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The film was kind of a dorm-room standard in the late 1990s, a surrealist take on Thompson’s classic and quasifictional 1972 account of a drug-fueled search for the American Dream. I remember watching Fear and Loathing in my dormitory basement with a passel of stoned freshmen, giggling at the trippy visuals and at Johnny Depp’s comic portrayal of Raoul Duke, Thompson’s profligate alter ego. For those unfamiliar, Fear and Loathing is essentially a psychedelic buddy comedy. The protagonists are the journalist Duke and his bad-mannered Samoan lawyer, Dr. Gonzo (an overweight, mustachioed Benicio del Toro). The two of them spend 118 minutes wandering around Las Vegas in an LSD fog, wreaking havoc on hotel rooms, halfheartedly reporting on a big-purse motorcycle race, and lamenting the inevitable decline of the California counterculture. To an audience of Clinton-era undergrads at a state college in small-town Wisconsin, the movie’s mind-altering milieu was as foreign as anything Fellini might have cooked up.

  I read the book shortly thereafter. In its day, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a bestseller, published a year after it was serialized in the pages of Rolling Stone. At the time, Thompson was a literary up-and-comer, known mostly for his reporting on the popular politics and subcultures of the 1960s, and Fear and Loathing was a deranged blend of fact and fiction that made his name. The New York Times called it “a custom-crafted study of paranoia, a spew from the 1960s and—in all its hysteria, insolence, insult, and rot—a desperate and important book.” I read it cover to cover one afternoon, stealing pages between mozzarella-stick deliveries during a slow shift at the Applebee’s where I waited tables.

  From the get-go, Thompson’s writing style got its hooks in me—his sense of humor, his exaggerated descriptions, the raw confessional tone with which he describes a fragmenting American society. He famously referred to his work as “gonzo journalism,” and I admired his gall for brazenly branding his own technique, like a boxer or an avantgarde painter. His writing was indeed subversive for its day, blending old-fashioned immersion reporting with literary techniques more reliably found in fiction—tools like scene, dialogue, and point of view that had mostly been the domain of novelists and short-story writers. Critics in the early ’70s referred to this style as “the New Journalism,” and Thompson was considered one of the genre’s standouts, alongside now-canonized writers like Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, and Truman Capote.

  Not that his prose style is necessarily what Thompson is remembered for. In the popular consciousness, Thompson’s name and his “gonzo” brand are more immediately associated with the flamboyant drug use and crazed antics that eventually came to complement or cloud his literary reputation, depending on whom you ask. From his early fame as a Rolling Stone contributor in the 1970s to his suicide in 2005, he built a pop-culture legacy around his unconcealed fondness for Wild Turkey, cocaine, and LSD. He invited camera crews onto his homestead near Aspen to watch him fire automatic weapons and detonate explosives. In 1970, he ran for Aspen’s county sheriff on the Freak Power ticket. In the ’80s, he was a regular patron and honorary manager at San Francisco’s storied O’Farrell Theatre sex club, and in 1990, police raided his home to seize an apothecary of illegal drugs, along with several sticks of dynamite. When he shot himself at age sixty-seven, he left behind a madman’s legacy and a note that read, “No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun.”

  But long before any of that, Thompson was just a twentysomething kid with thirty bucks trying to hitch a ride off of Aruba. Which is why The Proud Highway made up the bulk of my carry-on. The book is one of the few pieces of Thompsonalia to pre-date the emergence of the author’s loose-cannon public persona. It’s a collection of letters that Thompson sent in the late ’50s and early ’60s, back when he was just an eager and anonymous young freelancer, and included within are eighteen letters he wrote during a single year spent wandering across South America.

  Outside the Barranquilla airport, I reached into my bag to feel for the book, patting it with one hand while I waved down a cab with the other. As I arrived in Colombia, clueless and luggageless, those eighteen letters were the closest thing I had to a guide.

  “Goddamn,” said the photographer a few hours later, looking at me from across the table of a Barranquilla pub. “This might not be the ugliest city I’ve ever seen, but it is a hella strong contender.”

  The two of us were seated in a strip-mall sports bar in a bland commercial stretch of the city. I took a sip from my beer and looked out the window, where a column of beige and boxy office towers hemmed us in. The palms along the road seemed to wither in the evening heat, and my sweat-soaked shirt clung like a cobweb to the back of my vinyl chair. I let the cool bottle linger against my lips, a momentary antidote to the swampy humidity. Beer consumption on this trip was going to be high, I thought.

  My drinking companion was photographer Sky Gilbar, a California expat living in Panama and an accomplished Associated Press photographer who’d worked extensively in Latin America—though not so extensively he wasn’t still prone to grating Cali-isms like “hella.” In the weeks after buying my impromptu plane ticket, I had surfed the social networks for some travel advice, and Sky and I were introduc
ed online by a friend of a friend. “Colombia is a stunningly beautiful country,” he wrote in an e-mail, “with the warmest people you are likely to find anywhere on Earth. Did I mention the most beautiful women on the planet?” I was going to have a great trip, Sky assured me, although he wasn’t so sure about my proposed itinerary. Barranquilla, for starters, was nothing but a “hot and bland port city.” Of all the sunny, sexy destinations in Colombia, why would I want to go there?

  I asked Sky whether he was familiar with Hunter Thompson. Sure, he said, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, right? In fact, he was a big fan. So I decided to tell him everything I knew about the Hunter S. Thompson Trail across South America.

  It’s not a part of Thompson’s biography that gets much attention, but from May of 1962 to May of 1963, the future “gonzo journalist” was a freelance South American correspondent for a since-defunct newspaper called the National Observer. At the time, he was twenty-four years old, still a starving unknown looking to make a name for himself as a writer. He’d been churning out short stories since he was in high school and, for a couple years, doing some small-time freelancing, contributing short, newsy features to papers like the Louisville Courier-Journal and the New York Herald Tribune. In 1960, he’d spent a few months working in Puerto Rico—a decidedly non-glamorous job at an English-language bowling magazine—and after returning home broke, he’d started work on a novel about licentious American drifters living in San Juan, called The Rum Diary. But Thompson was restless, looking for his big break.

  A Kentuckian by upbringing, he was living on the California coast when his South America plan materialized. He’d spent most of 1961 shacked up in the pastoral, bohemian enclave of Big Sur, hunting wild boar, working on the novel, and rubbing shoulders with folks like Henry Miller and Joan Baez. From well-traveled local luminaries like Miller, he’d heard tales of the expat life, and he’d done just enough island-hopping the year before to get a taste of it. His travels in the Caribbean had taken him within a few hundred miles of the South American mainland, and in Thompson’s imagination, the continent was “the last frontier,” an unspoiled outback brimming with untold stories, where the field of freelancers was thin and the biggest story of the era—the Cold War—was playing itself out daily in the streets. In South America, Thompson figured, a hungry reporter could make a name for himself. Such a trip, he wrote in a letter, may be “my last chance to do something big and bad, come to grips with the basic wildness.”