Fear, loathing and Vegas 20 years after Hunter S. Thompson's death
The desert oasis is still humping the American Dream
Who are these people? These faces! They look like caricatures of used-car dealers from Dallas. But they're real. And, sweet Jesus, there are a hell of a lot of them — still screaming around these desert-city crap tables at four-thirty on a Sunday morning. Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last-minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino."
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1972
My flight to Las Vegas and my room at the Horseshoe have been booked for a couple months.
I’ll arrive five days before the 56th annual World Series of Poker Main Event begins. I’ll take my shot at a satellite to get into the world championship of poker but if I miss, that’s it for me. I have no plans to put up the full $10,000 buy-in.
Upwards of 10,000 players will enter the Main Event. To just get into the prize money, you’ll need to survive three very long days of poker, outlasting more than 8,500 other players. I have no delusions of grandeur and don’t have the budget to throw 10 grand away just to check off a bucket-list item.
Instead, I’ll play some smaller buy-in tournaments at the WSOP and other casinos on the Strip. The full WSOP schedule was released this week and there are several $1,000 buy-in and less tournaments scheduled while I’m there.
Mostly, I just want to experience the atmosphere and make some connections for my book project.
It will be my first trip to Vegas in 11 years. I was there in January 2014 for a travel bloggers conference and stayed an extra week to play poker. I broke even until you factor in the meals and hotel room, though I don’t really remember too much about the poker except for getting eviscerated at the Bellagio 2-5 game.
My clearest memory of the trip was trying to nap when someone started banging on my door, obviously not deterred by the “do not disturb” sign.
I opened the door to a large, bald gentleman, his tattooed biceps blowing out the sleeves of a skin-tight black t-shirt. He was holding a wad of hundred dollar bills the size of a grapefruit. "I'm supposed to deliver this to Carlo,” he said, his eyes narrowing — you could hear the gears grinding inside his head. "Are you Carlo?"
My instinct was to reach out and take the cash — I’m guessing about $20,000 — but for a brief moment, I see how that plays out. We lock eyes and both agree that, indeed, I am not Carlo.
If this encounter had happened anywhere else in the world, it might have unnerved me. But this was Vegas where it hardly seemed unusual in a place where greed, overindulgence and lust serve more as guiding principles than deadly sins.
Vegas is decadent and depraved. That much we know.
But it was Hunter S. Thompson who made us feel that this was a perfectly normal state of being — that the best way to tackle this desert oasis is at hyper-speed, our brains lubed with a free-flowing river of booze and whatever mind-altering substances we’ve procured.
Over the past 50 years, his seminal work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, has inspired legions of Hawaiian-shirt-wearing freaks to push the stakes higher, faster and wilder than they ever would back home. They want to be Hunter S. Thompson, or at least his alter ego Raoul Duke, if only for one glorious, hungover weekend. It's less a pilgrimage than a quest; as if they're hoping to run into the same man-eating lizards that an acid-gobbling Duke encountered at the Mint Hotel.
Thompson’s visit to Las Vegas in 1971 (he was there covering a motorcycle race for Sports Illustrated) stands as the gold standard for all Sin City benders.1
However, the book, at its core, was less a celebration of bacchanalian excess and more an indictment of a city that reveled in it. Thompson and his sidekick L.A. civil rights lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta weren’t searching for the American Dream as much as looking to confirm that it was dead, choked to death on its own vomit there in the desert.
I’m not sure Fear and Loathing was actually Thompson’s best work — Hell’s Angels was a masterpiece of new journalism — but it is what he’s most remembered for.
Twenty years ago today, a 67-year-old Thompson put a .45 caliber Smith & Wesson handgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. It wasn't hard to predict this is how he would go out. He was, after all, a decades-long habitual drug and alcohol abuser, fascinated with guns and violence and deeply paranoid of everything and everyone.
He had been in declining health and suffering from depression. All those clips on YouTube that present a slow, unsteady and mumbling Thompson doing interviews in the last few years of his life are less funny and more tragic in retrospect.
His last known written words were to his wife the day before he killed himself on his Woody Creek, Colorado farm: “Football Season is Over. No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won’t hurt.”
The year before Thompson visited Vegas for Fear and Loathing, Binion’s Horseshoe Casino hosted the first World Series of Poker. Not many people outside a few hardcore poker players were aware it was happening.
About 30 players participated in the first iteration of the WSOP. None of them could imagine what it would become. Last year, a record-setting 10,043 players from all over the world entered the Main Event vying for a piece of its $94 million prize pool.
In 2005, during the World Series of Poker, I made a final table at Binion’s. Unfortunately, for me, I wasn’t actually playing at the World Series of Poker. The WSOP was across town at Harrah’s Rio, the first time the series was held outside of Binion’s in its 35 years. (Since 2022, Caesar’s Horseshoe and Paris on the Vegas Strip have served as the host casinos.)
Moving the WSOP from Vegas’ crusty old downtown to the gleaming Strip made sense. If the Las Vegas strip is like Disney World for adults, then Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas is the state fair.
Bargain hunters make it downtown for the cheap rooms, the two-deck black-jack tables and, until a few years ago, the deep-fried Twinkies sold at Mermaids Casino (RIP).
I chronicled my 2005 trip to Vegas in a poker column I was writing at the time. Here’s how I described the scene:
It's strange and a little sad this year at Binion's without the World Series. Raven was over at the Rio dealing in the tournaments and she hated it. A vast poker wasteland, she called it, though not in those exact words.
The scene at the Rio is almost surreal. Imagine a huge convention hall lined wall-to-wall with poker tables. Fans with cameras mingle among poker's biggest names.
My friends pose for a picture with Phil Gordon and chat with Phil Ivey as he drops his shiny red Mercedes off with the valet. They tell me a story of how Phil Hellmuth is sent to time out for 10 minutes for dropping the F-bomb, and how he comes back to the table and promptly says it again, getting banished for 20 more minutes.
The Rio is everything that Binion's is not. The Rio is bright and active and big enough to handle the more than 6,000 players who will sit down in two weeks for the largest, most lucrative poker tournament ever.
The Rio is also cold and a lot more corporate than Binion's ever was. The World Series has become the Super Wal-Mart of poker tournaments.
Several years ago, a friend celebrated his birthday in Vegas, rereading Fear and Loathing on the flight out. He broke out of the gate strong, but Vegas isn't a city for sprinters.
After four mind-numbing days of boozing, smoking and gambling, with only a few hours of sleep, he returned to Florida shell shocked. His recovery was painful — a mental hangover made worse by a hacking cough that took weeks to shake. My friend, a pack-a-day smoker before the trip, hasn't had a cigarette since.
As Thompson wrote, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
For Thompson, the ride was a rented red Chevy convertible loaded with booze and pharmaceuticals, pointed east into the desert in search of the American Dream. It was inevitable that the end would bring disappointment. In fact, he and Acosta found what they were looking for burned to the ground, just a charred slab of concrete marking the place where locals said a nightclub known as the American Dream once stood.2
The idea had been something Thompson had wrestled with for awhile. Three years earlier, he had signed a deal with Random House to write a book on “The Death of the American Dream,” but had not gotten very far by the time his Sports Illustrated assignment came about. The idea for Fear and Loathing grew out of that first trip to Vegas but the book actually combined two different visits to the city of lights. Thompson and Acosta returned to Las Vegas a month after their original trip with the intention of fleshing out the death of the dream concept.3
Writing for Harvard’s Neiman Foundation in 2017, author David L. Ulin says Thompson’s disillusionment came from seeing what became of the 1960s counterculture movement.
“There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning,” [Thompson] writes of San Francisco in that decade. “… Our energy would simply prevail.” Still, from the perspective of the Nixon years, he understands this was an illusion — or even worse, a lie. “So now,” he concludes, in one of the book’s most devastating passages, “less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Fear and Loathing was neither novel nor documentary but, like most of his writing, something in between.
"Only a goddamn lunatic would write a thing like this and then claim it was true," Thompson said in an interview some 30 years after the book was published.
For Thompson, the father of Gonzo Journalism, it was always about being more accurate than factual.
He was a hopped up, pill-popping Hemingway, without the sexual repression.
Like Hemingway, Thompson was a devoted sportsman. He was also an unrepentant gambler. His columns for ESPN.com were often about gambling, mostly about his passion for betting on football and basketball.
"Gambling on football has never been really Good for you; but on some days, it can be serious Fun," he wrote in one column.
I don't know if he played poker. He may have sat down at his share of card tables, a bottle of Wild Turkey at his elbow, a loaded sidearm tucked in his waistband. But it's just as likely he didn't have the patience for poker, a game that, if played well, requires large amounts of concentration and focus.
Nevertheless, James McManus, author of the best-selling Positively Fifth Street, an account of his experiences at the 2000 World Series of Poker, found inspiration in Thompson's Fear and Loathing. McManus stayed at the Mint Hotel, just two floors above the room Thompson stayed in during his 1971 acid trip.
McManus wrote: "Instead of the trunkload of psychedelics, booze and pharmaceuticals Thompson deployed as both subject and fuel for his piece, I'll be sticking to vitamins and mineral water, Zocor and laps in the pool ... Whatever the opposite of gonzo is, that will be me."
When I first read that passage I was in my 30s, too young for it to resonate. That’s no longer the case. I’ll be in Vegas this summer a year before I turn 60. I’m sure I’ll have a few drinks after I’m done playing for the day but there certainly won’t be any booze-fueled nights that stretch into the next morning. The only pills I’ll pop are my daily doses of high blood pressure and gout medication; my CPAP machine will be plugged in next to the bed.
We want to be Hunter S. Thompson, just like we want to climb Mount Everest. Which is to say it's nice to think so, but we're not only afraid of the consequences but know deep inside that we’re not up to the challenge, either mentally or physically. So we pretend and we imitate but we know we'll never soak our heads in ether, or pop as much mescal and amphetamines, or capture the decadence and depravity of America with the same magnificent, exaggerated flourishes.
RIP Hunter S. Thompson, July 18, 1937 - February 20, 2005.
I’m writing a non-fiction book that tries to answer the question of what makes the top professional poker players special? What intangible qualities are the best players born with and what skills and knowledge do they acquire that propels them to the highest peaks of the game? This newsletter provides a look into the creative process and offers a rough draft of selected passages in real time.
Despite the widely-held belief that Thompson and Acosta did in fact do copious amounts of hallucinogenic substances on their trip to Las Vegas, there’s some evidence that the only drugs they had on the trip were marijuana and Dexedrine, a stimulant often used to treat ADHD. Not to say that Thompson and Acosta would not have done LSD and mescaline if they had been able to procure it. Timothy Denevi provides a detailed an account of the actual trip and the circumstances behind Fear and Loathing in the footnotes to a retrospective he wrote in 2016.
In Fear and Loathing, Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo discover that the “American Dream” was actually an old night club in Paradise, Nevada. The author of the OGMD substack writes about the real-life nightclub that existed at that location and how it burned down.
Rolling Stone published Thompson’s two-part essay on the American Dream in November 1971 under the byline Raoul Duke. Random House published the book the following year but insisted that it bear Thompson’s real name.